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#These gray reef sharks are BFFs, scientists say

#These gray reef sharks are BFFs, scientists say

August 14, 2020 | 1:22pm

The sharks that slay together stay together.

While the killer fish can rarely be called friendly, a new study has revealed that gray reef sharks, a type known to attack humans, prefer to paint the ocean red with a tight-knit crew of “friends.”

The many-toothed predator, which can grow up to about 8 feet long and weigh 70 pounds in some cases, can be found patrolling the coral reefs of the Pacific and Indian oceans during the day, while at night they hunt the high seas.

Near Palmyra Atoll, an island wildlife refuge 1,000 miles southwest of Hawaii, marine biologists with Florida International University affixed small, high-frequency sound transmitters, called “tags,” onto 41 gray reef sharks, and set up a network of 65 acoustic receivers on the sea floor to detect their movement over a four-year period.

Unlike most sharks, which lead solitary lives, researchers discovered that these sharks swim with a lifelong posse of up to 20 pals, and rarely visit other groups.

“We don’t think of sharks as social animals, but they do have social groups,” FIU biologist Yannis Papastamatiou told New Scientist. However, “they purposely associate with the same individuals,” he said, demonstrating they can actually tell their friends apart. How they know who’s who remains a mystery to us.

Whether they also prowl open waters together for a bite is also unclear, as their hunting ground is way too far for the receivers to track.

Papastamatiou, whose report was published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, insisted that, despite the reef sharks’ loyalty, they’re actually rolling together out of convenience.

“They are not friends in the sense of having any emotional bond with each other,” he explained. Instead, scientists believe strength in numbers may give them an advantage over catching prey, though they don’t appear to be deliberately sharing food.

At the very least, it suggests a mutual respect for the “finders-keepers” rule.

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