New research delves into shark smarts

Sharks are not the big, dumb, bullies of the sea that you might suspect. Over the last 20 years, research into shark behavior has gotten more sophisticated and it's turned up some surprising findings about what's going on in the brains of these "mindless death fish from hell". To wit:

"There's a clear line between the higher and lower vertebrates in terms of brain-to-body weight," Gruber [Samuel Gruber from the University of Miami] explains. "Birds and mammals have a higher ratio; fish, amphibians and reptiles are lower. But sharks land above the line associated with these lower vertebrates. They've been independently evolving for half a billion years, and they have brains that are comparable to [those of] mammals in some ways."

His research showed that lemon sharks were able to remember a visual discrimination task for at least a year without retraining, and Gruber says they also showed spatial preferences akin to "handedness" in mammals.

That's pretty cool, especially given the fact that I just spent the past two weeks delving into the cognition and complex behavior of another underestimated class of sea creatures—cephalopods. It's enough to make me wish that Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus had been more heavily grounded in science. Instead of jumping up and biting a 747 in half, Mega Shark could have challenged Giant Octopus to a run through a Ginormous Maze in the laboratory of a Massive Psychology Researcher. I don't know about you, but I'd have watched that.

Scientific American: Today's Sharks: Smart, Tagged and In Short Supply

(Via John Pavlus, who, I just realized, is also the author of this piece. Good work, John!)

Image:Some rights reserved by StormyDog

• [djfatsostupid]

  I hope that when researching shark intelligence they keep L.L. Cool J close by.

• [daneyul]

  “But sharks land above the line associated with these lower vertebrates. They’ve been independently evolving for half a billion years”

  As opposed to “dependently” evolving?

  Independently evolved is something I would think would apply to an animal existing in an environment relatively isolated from the rest of the world, e.g. Australia, or the Galapagos. How does that word apply to sharks which live in all the oceans?

  • [Francois Comeau-Lapointe]

    One thing to say: I LOVE sharks!!! They are awesome creatures. It’s sad their environnement is being destroyed year after year, and it’s sad how they are being hunted and slaughtered.

    -François Comeau-Lapointe.

• [alllie]

  I wanted to put a plug in for Eugenie Clark, the Shark Lady. She’s gotten pretty old but I really enjoyed her shark books and her love of sharks.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenie_Clark

  • [mkultra]

    alllie,

    I also joined this thread to mention Dr. Clark… she is a real pioneer into shark intelligence and behavioral studies… even back into the ’50s, ’60s and beyond.

    For a lady born in 1922, that’s pretty amazing.

• [Matt Staggs]

  Now I deeply regret not having “Mindless death fish from hell” as my Boing Boing handle.

• [benher]

  This looks like a job for “Bigger Jaws!”

• [Anonymous]

  At least sharks don’t trawl massive seine nets that destroy entire schools of fish, or dump munitions, old chemical weapons, radioactive waste, trash, etc into the ocean. They’ve never conducted dozens of nuclear tests that wiped out entire islands and left radioactive hot spots for decades. They don’t spill massive amounts of oil in the ocean or acidify the water with CO2 or kill for trivial bits of an animal that they don’t really need (shark fin soup). So all in all I’d say the real killers in the water are the two legged animals.

• [Pipenta]

  Anyone who underestimates cephs is probably a little shy of gray matter themselves.

• [Felton]

  It’ll be quite a blow to my self-esteem if it turns out they can beat me at chess.

• [Anonymous]

  Shark feeding isn’t the disorganised mob frenzy it appears to be at first sight; I recall seeing some research published around the turn of the century that observed a very, very polite hierarchy and careful ‘courtesy’ allowing others to go first.

  Put simply, reef sharks and hammerheads are too well-armed and, while a three-metre long shark is entitled to a degree of deference from a two-metre shark, either one is thoroughly capable of ripping the other open if it came to a fight… So fights are rare, and sharks have evolved conflict-avoidance strategies and the necessary communications skills that go with them.

  Which, in turn, needs brains. Not, perhaps the brains associated with collaborative hunting strategies (see dolphins, wolves, chimpanzees and humans); but then again, I may have missed more recent research… Although I suspect that very few researchers ever get close to such a dangerous subject.