My Climate Change News

It's a tough time to be a shark. Pollution, industrialized fishing, and climate change threaten marine life, and the populations of many top ocean predators have declined in recent years. In addition to studying sharks in the wild, scientists working to save sharks rely on ones living in zoos and aquariums so that they can help build breeding programs and learn more about the conditions sharks need to thrive. One important way the scientists do that is by playing matchmakers to the sharks, pairing up individuals in ways that increase genetic diversity. In a new study in Scientific Reports, scientists undertook the largest-ever effort to artificially inseminate sharks.Their work resulted in 97 new baby sharks, including ones whose parents live on opposite sides of the country and a few that don't have fathers at all. "Our goal was to develop artificial insemination as a tool that could be used to help support and maintain healthy reproducing populations of sharks in aquariums," says Jen

"Moving whole animals from one aquarium to another to mate is expensive and can be stressful for the animal, but now we can just just move genes around through sperm," says Kevin Feldheim, a researcher at Chicago's Field Museum and a co-author of the study who led the DNA analysis of the newborn sharks to determine their parentage.

Figuring out shark parentage can be tricky because shark reproduction isn't always straightforward. In some species, female sharks can store sperm for months after mating and they use it for fertilization "on demand", so the father of a newborn shark isn't necessarily the male the mother most recently had contact with. Some female sharks are even capable of reproducing with no male at all, a process called parthenogenesis. In parthenogenesis, the female's egg cells are able to combine with each other, creating an embryo that only contains genetic material from the mother.