The burgeoning and largely unregulated trade in shark fins represents one of the most serious threats to shark populations worldwide. In Hong Kong, the world's largest shark fin market, fins are classified by traders into Chinese-name categories on the basis of market value, but the relationship between market category and shark species is unclear preventing identification of species that are t...

The nurse shark, Ginglymostoma cirratum, is an obligate suction feeder that preys on benthic invertebrates and fish. Its cranial morphology exhibits a suite of structural and functional modifications that facilitate this mode of prey capture. During suction-feeding, subambient pressure is generated by the ventral expansion of the hyoid apparatus and the floor of its buccopharyngeal cavity. As i...

2 Introduction Cartilaginous fishes (Chondrichthyes) are the most basal extant jawed vertebrates that diverged from the common ancestor of tetrapods and teleost fishes (Osteichthyes) approximately 530 Myr ago (Kumar and Hedges, 1998; Fig.1). Cartilaginous fishes possess a body plan and complex physiological systems that are typical of all jawed vertebrates, but are lacking in the jawless verteb...

Three large lamniform shark vertebrae are described from the Lower Cretaceous of Texas. We interpret these fossils as belonging to a single individual with a calculated total body length of 6.3 m. This large individual compares favorably to another shark specimen from the roughly contemporaneous Kiowa Shale of Kansas. Neither specimen was recovered with associated teeth, making confident identi...

This document introduces problems associated with shark catch data and CPUE indices using the Japanese longline fishery in the Atlantic as an example. A number of methods for addressing issues of under-reporting, short time series, and undifferentiated shark species are introduced including reporting rate filtering, comparison to observer datasets, covariate analysis, meta-analysis and tradebas...

Overexploitation threatens the future of many large vertebrates. In the ocean, tunas and sea turtles are current conservation concerns because of this intense pressure. The status of most shark species, in contrast, remains uncertain. Using the largest data set in the Northwest Atlantic, we show rapid large declines in large coastal and oceanic shark populations. Scalloped hammerhead, white, an...

Web crawling is an important approach for collecting larger-scale web data on, and keeping up with, the rapidly expanding Internet. This paper puts forward the improved shark search approach for crawling large-scale Web data based on link clustering and the technology of tunnel. In this study we focus on the classification of Web links instead of downloaded web pages to determine relevancy whic...

The diversity of marine communities is in striking contrast with the diversity of terrestrial communities. In all oceans, species richness is low in tropical areas and high at latitudes between 20 and 40°. While species richness is a primary metric used in conservation and management strategies, it is important to take into account the complex phylogenetic patterns of species compositions withi...

New wireless protocols like W-LAN and Bluetooth allow establishing spontaneous networks and peer-to-peer exchange of information. At the same time standards like Semantic Web and Topic Maps gain acceptance that add semantics to information. This paper introduces Shark. Shark is an acronym and stands for “Mobile Shared Knowledge”. Shark organizes knowledge with help of Topic Maps, synchronizes k...

In-water viewing of sharks by tourists has become a popular and lucrative industry. There is some concern that interactions with tourists with ecotourism operations might harm sharks through disruption of behaviours. Here, we analysed five years of whale shark (Rhincodon typus) encounter data by an ecotourism industry at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to assess the impact of ecotourism inter...