NORTH Padre Island for Spring Break.

My wife works in the Biology Lab of a local Junior College, so our vacations revolve around the academic calendar. While my wife's students were at South Padre working on their sunburns and hangovers, we visited Padre Island National Seashore. Sixty miles of undeveloped beach accessible by four wheel drive vehicle, and we explored every inch of it! When you're sixty miles from the nearest road, the crowds really thin out! We birded, fished, crabbed, and built sand castles. On our way back to civilization, we met a very nice local couple the turned out to be prime examples of citizen science in action.

As we were driving north on our last day on the island, we approached a large SUV that had a platform mounted on its roof. On top of the platform was a man with a sport fishing rod, and it was REALLY bent. It was obvious he had hooked something big. My wife (who has far more patience than me) is an avid angler, who hadn't had much luck on this trip. She wanted to stop and watch. She is also much more social than me, and had soon struck up a conversation with the man's girlfriend, and learned that he was pretty sure he had hooked up a Bull Shark. Sure enough, slowly but surely, the man, who identified himself as "Oz" brought to shore a 5-6 foot Bull Shark.

At this point I was steeling myself to witness some sort of chest-thumping, kill-the-monster, macho display. Instead, Oz and his girlfriend worked rapidly and efficiently to measure, tag, get tissue samples, photograph and release the shark in less than 5 minutes. It turns out that Oz has been participating in ongoing shark conservation research for many years, and gathered data on, and tagged over 100 sharks!

I'm going to send the two of them an iNaturalist invite!

Posted on March 20, 2016 03:04 AM by bogslogger