Dive boat operators face charges of illegally feeding sharks in state waters

[guyharrisonphoto]

Dang, Netdoc, I had gotten all serious and then you crack me up with the dinosaur and the nipple joke!

 

[boulderjohn]

umm... My response was to netdoc, and I see that I mistyped the word "Credit" for the word "intelligent" for it's first usage in my summary. If you insert it correctly into my statement in my previous post, it will read:

Should read: He says that fish are far more intelligent than we give them CREDIT for.
Does read: He says that fish are far more credit than we give them CREDIT for.

In short, sir, I was supporting your post. And your incorrect assumption does not impress me, no matter how eloquently stated.

If my typo made my sentence completely unintelligible to you, I apologize.

I know you were supporting me. I was not contradicting you. I was supplying additional information. I guess my communication skills are truly subpar today.

 

[The Chairman]

Dang, Netdoc, I had gotten all serious and then you crack me up with the dinosaur and the nipple joke!

Think of me as the Devil's Advocate. I see both sides of this issue and I often choose to represent the least vocal side. Not so much to troll but rather to elicit a spirited and thought provoking dialog.

 

[iluvtheocean]

It can be taken that animals - fish & sharks included in this case, like humans have a range of intelligence. You can have truly dumb animals and smart ones even within the same "family" unit.

is there a difference between intelligence and common sense? I know my wife's students are very intelligent (and have had IQ tests to prove it) but at least some of them have no common sense.


and i believe the only reason FWC got involved even though there were complaints was that it was within state waters... Whether we agree with the practices or not, federal law doesn't prohibit it outside of state waters. and in the eyes of the law, they don't care if it was a few feet or a few hundred feet inside.... i personally don't know anybody who has gotten hurt on one of his shark dives and it is a case of "caveat emptor" -- when you book the trip you know it's going to be a trip where they are going to try and attract sharks..

i think my biggest complaint about the feeding vs chumming is hand-feeding/off a spear etc. it does teach the critters to expect it. a feed station where the food is an nobody is handing it out i think is safer & less likely to train risky behaviors. with chumming being less risky than that...

someone mentioned tagging to track the sharks in regards to this issue --- would be something to suggest to Nova or FIU as a grad study...

 

[guyharrisonphoto]

Think of me as the Devil's Advocate. I see both sides of this issue and I often choose to represent the least vocal side. Not so much to troll but rather to elicit a spirited and thought provoking dialog.

The dinosaur thing was the best, where on earth did you find that?

If it did not say Jesus, I would have said that is the first of the Randy Jordan ancestors!

 

[boulderjohn]

I just want to add something about my previous post. The two marine biologists with which I spoke said that the behaviors I described in related to the lionfish and the divers was absolutely a learned behavior and not what some people here are suggesting is instinct. They went into it at length. I can try to recreate the explanation, but I am sure my non-scientist summary would suffer.

 

[The Chairman]

The dinosaur thing was the best, where on earth did you find that?

This isn't the only forum I belong to. I've had quite the debate with young earthers over the years. That was actually resented as evidence for a young earth. It's been printed, so it MUST be true.

If it did not say Jesus, I would have said that is the first of the Randy Jordan ancestors!

2 phunni! The OT suggests that we should have dominion over the beasts of the field. Literalists take this to the extreme, way past any rational limits.

The two marine biologists with which I spoke said that the behaviors I described in related to the lionfish and the divers was absolutely a learned behavior and not what some people here are suggesting is instinct.

John, the appeal to authority is, well, appealing. However, until you see a published peer reviewed study including those same observations, I would take those candid observations with a grain of salt. There's a lot of bad science out there espoused by self proclaimed experts, just as there is a lot of bad Scuba instruction given by certified instructors.

 

[boulderjohn]

As for fish intelligence in general, let's start with this quote cleaned from Wikipedia: According to Culum Brown from Macquarie University, "Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of ‘higher’ vertebrates including non-human primates."[1]

From the BBC we have this information:

Writing in the journal Fish and Fisheries, biologists Calum Brown, Keven Laland and Jens Krause said fish were now seen as highly intelligent creatures.

They said: "Gone (or at least obsolete) is the image of fish as drudging and dim-witted pea-brains, driven largely by 'instinct',' with what little behavioural flexibility they possess being severely hampered by an infamous 'three-second memory'.

"Now, fish are regarded as steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and co-operating to inspect predators and catch food."​

As for shark intelligence this article on shark intelligence explains the differences among the terms reflex, instrinct, and intelligence. It also says experiments have shown that sharks have memories and can be trained.

This article from the Smithsonian focuses on the intelligence of the Great White Shark and includes this quote:

Compagno, 64, has run the Shark Research Centre of the Iziko South African Museum for more than two decades. ...Much of his work entails observing behavior, and he's found the fish to be a surprisingly intelligent creature. "When I'm on the boat, they'll pop their heads out of the water and look me directly in the eye," he told me. "Once, when there were several people on the boat, the great white looked each person in the eye, one by one, checking us out. They feed on large-brained social animals such as seals and dolphins, and to do this you have to operate on a level higher than a simple machine mentality of an ordinary fish."​

Here is what National Geographic has to say about the GWS:

But the great white shark is NOT the mindless killing machine seen in the movies. The shark is smart. It has a large and complex brain. A great white doesn’t just bite the first thing it bumps into – it has different strategies for different prey. Catching seals takes more than just cunning, speed and power.​

This clip from an episode of the BBC Earth series attempts to explain why sharks (not just GWS) are more intelligent than most fish. In this clip it speaks of their intelligence, but I am afraid it does ot go into that intelligence beyond that.

The Scientific American says

This research is revealing, among other things, that even sharks like the great white are intelligent, curious animals with cognitive abilities worth studying. "Many sharks have good learning capacity, which is one way we measure intelligence," says Samuel Gruber, a marine biologist at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS), who discovered in 1975 that lemon sharks could learn a classical conditioning task 80 times faster than a cat or rabbit. "I was shocked to find that they could learn so rapidly," he says.​

 

[The Chairman]

Sorry John, until you can show a shark balancing a ball on it's snout, they aren't really trainable in the traditional sense of the word.

Most of of what you cited is overly sensationalistic. The pseudo scientists know they have to wow us with their insight and revelations in order to retain our interest. I'm inured to their shocks, wary of their discoveries and down right resentful of their approach. How about some real scientific studies showing us a shark solving a real problem. They have incredible vids of Octopi doing just that: why not a shark?

 

[danvolker]

Sorry John, until you can show a shark balancing a ball on it's snout, they aren't really trainable in the traditional sense of the word.

Most of of what you cited is overly sensationalistic. The pseudo scientists know they have to wow us with their insight and revelations in order to retain our interest. I'm inured to their shocks, wary of their discoveries and down right resentful of their approach. How about some real scientific studies showing us a shark solving a real problem. They have incredible vids of Octopi doing just that: why not a shark?

You mean you haven't seen the Shark Week vids of some divers inside an impenatrable "Shark Cage" , and the white shark figures out how to penetrate the cage..sort of like a messy kid opening up a well wrapped Big Mac

Better was the video of the Polar bear scientists inside the cages in Alaska, so that they could watch the bears walk by in a wilderness setting....and the polar bears began rolling the cage around --their version of figuring out a Rubic Cube...and you could really see them thinking about how they were going to get the "food" out of the cage!