Salmons do it, turtles do it. Now researchers know that sharks do it too. An international team of researchers from the Bahamas, Canada, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. followed lemon sharks for 17 years, tagging them to figure out when and where offsprings give birth. They captured pregnant sharks and tracked DNA of baby sharks.
The results published in Molecular Ecology concluded that while it had been speculated that female sharks return to their exact birthplace to breed–a phenomenon known as natal philopatry–the scientists’ findings found the first direct evidence of it in sharks.
At least six of the females tracked from 1993 return to a spot in Bimini, Bahamas to give birth for nearly two decades.
Photo credit: IBTimes
