When nearly 100 baby hammerhead sharks were found dead in June at Keehi Lagoon, I felt sick. The photos of the little sharks, dumped like so much trash, were so disturbing that I left the TV and stalked to the beach fuming.
It was a callous killing of some of Hawaii’s most remarkable native animals.
Hammerhead sharks get their name from their cartoonish heads, looking like something that got smashed beneath one of Wile E. Coyote’s falling anvils. Those goofy-looking heads, spread like flattened mallets, make the sharks look clumsy.
Not so. The head’s leading edge is bladelike, allowing the shark to cut efficiently through the water. The flat surface also acts as a kind of rudder providing lift. It’s their seemingly ungainly heads that make hammerhead sharks exceptionally maneuverable.
And exceptional hunters. A large eye on each side of the spread-out head gives the fish an extra-wide field of vision. Near the eyes are the fish’s nostrils containing sensory cells that detect odors. Other cells embedded in the skin under the flat head pick up electric fields in living organisms hiding in the sand.
Hammerheads find food by swinging the head back and forth over the ocean floor like a metal detector. When it detects a ray, octopus, fish or crustacean, it can pin it to the ocean floor with its head.
Hammerheads aren’t interested in eating people. Only two, nonfatal hammerhead shark bites have been recorded in Hawaii since 1779. Those were likely mistakes on the sharks’ part.
Hawaii hosts three species of hammerheads, the most common being the scalloped hammerhead. Between April and October scalloped hammerhead sharks come to our islands from offshore to mate and deliver their live pups in Kaneohe Bay, Keehi Lagoon, Waimea Bay and other shallow areas.
Scalloped hammerheads grow to 13 feet, but most are around 7 feet. Mature females are 3 to 4 feet longer than males, giving birth to 15 to 31 pups that are about 20 inches long. The youngsters spend three to four months in their birth bays eating shrimp and crabs on the ocean floor. Then off they go to hunt with the grown-ups in deep water.
No one knows who or what killed Keehi’s little sharks. One Hawaii reader believes that commercial fishers who were docked in Honolulu killed the mothers for their fins, valued on the black market, he wrote, at $2,000 each.
Several biologists guessed that the babies got caught in gillnets and drowned.
Whatever the cause, killing any hammerhead in Hawaii is senseless, depressing and cruel. Soup is an absurd reason to kill any shark, and gillnets should be banned here, as they are in Florida.
But then, just when I was feeling hopeless over this incident, I found an online video shot in June at the Kaneohe sandbar by the Wayne Kishida family. With people like this in Hawaii, there’s hope for our hammerheads.
To make your day, too, visit goo.gl/7gXAne Opens in a new tab.
Shakas, Mommy, shakas!
To reach Susan Scott, got to susanscott.net Opens in a new tab and click on “Contact” at the top of her home page.
