Lemon Sharks | National Geographic

for more than 40 years marine biologist
Samuel Gruber has been researching the
behavior of lemon sharks but he’s never
seen anything like this dozens of them
huddled together on the bottom here off
the coast of Jupiter Florida he’s about
to dive 80 feet below to find out why
the water is murky as Gruber gets deeper
it’s clear he’s not alone a school of
more than three dozen adult lemon sharks
ready and waiting summer as long as ten
feet an awesome sight but it doesn’t
stop Gruber from getting close enough to
touch them what are so many sharks doing
in the same place at the same time he
believes the Predators are displaying
what he calls refugee behavior they’re
out and about when the Sun Goes Down
they’re out feeding moving around and
when the Sun comes up they begin to go
to this particular place where they can
assemble and rest on the bottom now
resting on this bottom gives them a
little bit of an energetic edge in the
sense that they can face up into the
current and they don’t have to swim to
breathe
but there may be more to it than resting
lemon sharks are social animals and
sometimes school in small groups this
might also be a sort of mating game the
females are assembling here in order to
attract males that’s what I think is
going on here and in the way it works I
think is that early in December a group
of females who know to come here because
they’ve done it year after year will
assemble at this site gruber suspects
female lemon sharks have chosen this
reef as a place for producing chemical
signals called pheromones the pheromones
are carried by the currents and they
attract potential male suitors and then
it’s on to the domestic phase when this
group reaches a critical mass say around
March or February March they begin to
move out and they move into the lagoon
from mating and birthing which takes
place in April through June and if
Gruber’s hunch is right he can expect
another miracle soon when these
creatures bring a new generation of
lemon sharks into the ocean