![]() ![]() "He is a shark of the most sharklike propensities and his fury when he gets entangled in a net - as he sometimes does - is of the most ferocious nature," said a Los Angeles Herald article published in February 1906.īoca Grande Pass, the tiny body of water connecting Lee and Charlotte counties at the mouth of the Peace and Myakka rivers, soon became a world-renowned haven for sharks of epic proportions.īoca Grande Pass remains the primary grounds for large hammerheads, with the past three International Game Fish Association world records being pulled from the area - including the current record holder, Bucky Dennis, who caught a 13-foot, 1,360-pound hammerhead in 2008. However, there were always reports of at least one shark that stood out as a king among the beasts. Soon news of Florida's "man-eating monsters" circled the country. Charlie Thompson hauled in a 20-foot hammerhead that weighed in at 2,169 pounds. In 1905, while turtle fishing off the coast of the Everglades aboard his boat The Barracouta, Capt. Once the water begins to cool in late fall, the hammerheads head south again.įor as long as fishermen have set their lines in the Gulf, encounters with those massive hammerheads have been common. Hammerheads are frequent visitors along the Gulf Coast, arriving en masse as they follow the schools of tarpon heading north. Greg Stunz, director of the Harte Research Institute and also part of the Shark Week expedition. "They've got such a unique morphology with the hammer, and they are one of the biggest sharks in terms of ones that humans come in contact with, especially near the shore where encounters are prevalent," said Dr. Matt Ajemian, marine biologist and member of the Shark Week expedition. "It's amazing that these animals have been able to survive through several mass extinction events with little change to their biology," said Dr. Many of those sightings were attributed to giant hammerhead sharks cruising along the surface. ![]() Merchant mariners and supply vessels, paranoid from the attacks, reported sightings of unidentified watercraft cruising around the major shipping ports. To combat the invasion, the United States Coast Guard and Navy deployed dirigible blimps to patrol the coast. The freighter was torpedoed and sank 55 miles off the coast of Marco Island. Among them was the Baja California, a freighter carrying a load of military transport vehicles. In 1942 alone, the German submarines recorded 56 attacks on American ships off the coast of Florida, 40 of which ended up on the ocean's floor. The fabled fish even got its own prime-time slot in this year's Shark Week marathon on the Discovery Channel, which has spent 27 years celebrating the ocean's apex predators.Īlthough tales of massive hammerheads have been common up and down the coast since the turn of the 20th century, it wasn't until World War II that those tales took on near-mythical proportions.Īs the war efforts ramped up, German U-boats invaded American water, waging an all-out assault on any and all marine vessels. Stories of close encounters have been told around bait buckets for generations, passed down from father to son like heroic war stories. It has been immortalized in art and song. The announcement of their return comes on the heels of their wildly popular 10-day visit to Newport Aquarium in October 2014, which was the 67-year-old institution’s first visit to the Midwest.The mighty shark has been the subject of numerous newspaper headlines and documentaries over the years. Mermaids from Weeki Wachee Springs, Fla., will return to Newport Aquarium in October. Remaining in Canyon Falls will be Thunder, a more than 100-year-old snapping turtle and Newport Aquarium’s oldest resident, as well as the Turtle Corral, where guests have the unique opportunity to touch several species of tortoises. Other additions to Canyon Falls include two species of lizard never before seen at Newport Aquarium – yellow monitor, a rare and active tree-dwelling lizard from Indonesia, and panther chameleon, one of the most colorful lizards in the world from Madagascar. Newport Aquarium will offer scheduled otter talks at Canyon Falls that provide guests educational opportunities to learn more about otters and otter conservation. Asian small-clawed otters are returning to Newport Aquarium in mid-March. ![]()
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