Now that’s what you call a love bite! Creepy footage shows male sharks grabbing females with their TEETH during sex
They are some of the ocean’s most fearsome predators.
Research has now shown that sharks can be just as dangerous to their own kind as they are to their prey.
Gruesome footage shows the horrific injuries male sharks inflict as they grab females with their teeth during mating.
These bloody love bites are now helping scientists unravel the hidden secrets of sharks’ sex lives.
To mate, sharks must press their bellies together as the male penetrates the female.
That’s a fairly simple process for smaller, agile species.
However, larger sharks often have difficulty staying in line long enough.
This means that male sharks often violently bite their partner’s fins or gills to hold them in place, causing deep cuts.
During mating, male sharks bite the pectoral fins or gills of females to hold them in place long enough to press their bellies together
The researchers looked at ‘mating wounds’ suffered by sand tiger sharks, a species that can grow up to three meters long.
Because these sharks spend most of their time as solitary hunters who mate at sea, scientists don’t know many of the intimate details of their sex lives.
Although cases of mating in the wild have only rarely been observed, the researchers realized they could look at mating wounds instead.
Lead author Dr. Jennifer Wyffels, from the University of Delaware, said LiveScience: ‘Sharks and rays use their mouths to hold and position females and therefore mating wounds are common during the breeding season.
‘Observations of mating for any shark or ray species are very rare, so we used mating wounds as indirect evidence of reproductive behavior.’
First, Dr. Wyffels and her team observed a group of sand tiger sharks housed at the Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada Marine Science Center.
During this time, the researchers recorded the sharks’ mating and observed the male leaving serious wounds on the female.
The deepest wounds cut through the woman’s skin down to the muscle, but healed surprisingly quickly; they closed completely in just 22 days.
These violent rituals leave the females, and sometimes even the males, with deep ‘mating wounds’ that cut through the skin to the muscles.
Researchers examined the mating wounds that sand tiger sharks suffered in an aquarium as they healed. This allowed them to create a scale to rate the severity and freshness of mating wounds
By recording those injuries and the healing process, the researchers developed a scale to describe the severity and healing stages of mating wounds.
The scale ranges from fresh, open wounds in stage one to wounds in stage four that are beginning to scar.
Dr. Wyffels and her co-authors then applied this scale to photos in the Spot A Shark USA database, which collects images of shark sightings from citizens.
They analyzed 2,876 photos of 686 individual sand tiger sharks taken between 2015 and 2020.
These images showed that the number of stage 1 wounds increased sharply in late May, indicating that this is the peak of the breeding season.
By July, the number of new wounds had stabilized, indicating that the sharks were mating less often or doing so less violently.
In their paper, published in Environmental Biology of Fishes, the researchers write: ‘By mid-summer, mating has ceased due to the absence of stage 1 and 2 mating wounds in females.’
The fact that the number of new wounds was highest off the coast of North Carolina also suggests that this is a popular breeding ground for sand tiger sharks.
The researchers analyzed photos of sand tiger sharks in the Spot A Shark USA database to see how many mating wounds they had. Injuries sustained in areas labeled 3, 4, and 5 were classified as mating wounds
This showed that sharks had the freshest wounds in late May, indicating that the mating season occurs in mid to late summer. The data also shows that sharks with mating wounds were concentrated around North Carolina. This shows that the area is a breeding and carrying ground for sand tiger sharks
Similarly, the researchers noticed that this region had a large number of female sharks with wounds that had been healing for much longer.
They write: ‘The presence of stage 1 and 2 mating wounds in sand tiger sharks in North Carolina suggests that the area is used for mating, while females with stage 3 and 4 mating wounds provide evidence that the area also serves as a breeding habitat for this species. ‘
It not only provides new insights into the lives of these elusive creatures, but also confirms their incredible healing powers.
Sharks have been observed in the wild to live for long periods of time after sustaining apparently fatal wounds.
During the study, researchers even found sand tiger sharks living with jaws nearly torn off and parts of the skull exposed due to wounds.
However, they also found that the aquarium sharks’ wounds closed after 22 days and showed scarring after 85 days of being injured.
This rapid healing factor could explain how sharks survive so long after injuries and why their mating wounds very rarely lead to long-term damage.
WHAT GIVES RISE TO SHARKS’ SIXTH SENSE?
Sharks have electrosensory organs that act as a ‘sixth sense’
The ampullae of Lorenzini are visible as small pores in the skin around the head and on the underside of sharks, rays and rays.
Each pore is open and connected to a series of electrosensory cells by a long channel filled with a clear, viscous jelly.
The AoL jelly likely contributes to this electrosensory function, but the exact details of this contribution remain unclear.
“Skates and sharks have some of the most sensitive electroreceptors in the animal kingdom,” says Dr. David Julius, professor and chair of physiology at UCSF and senior author of a recent study on the mechanism.
“Understanding how this works is like understanding how proteins in the eye sense light – it gives us insight into a whole new sensory world,” he said.