Remember when Sharknado blew through everyone’s homes a couple months ago? All those sharks had to be buried somewhere, right? But you would’ve thought they’d build the box big enough to actually hold a shark.

All kidding aside, the shark coffin (unlike the Bacon Coffin that we featured a while back that’s actually a real coffin) was created by an advertising group in Shanghai for China’s International Fund for Animal Welfare. IFAW is hoping to bring awareness to the overfishing of sharks in the country. The agency’s shark coffins have popped up all over Shanghai along with an attached plaque explaining what’s going on and urging people to sign a petition to help the ocean’s top hunters.

50,000 people have signed that petition.

[Design TAXI]

Paul Clerkin, a shark ecology graduate student at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has been spending the last couple of months on a deep-sea trawling vessel in the Indian Ocean to see if the ship’s nets might pull up anything interesting in the way of sharks.

The trawler’s nets have been dropping to a depth of 6,500 feet off the coast of an island called Mauritius. What’s come up have been hundreds of strange-looking sharks. Several are species known to be very rare while others may be absolutely unseen before now.

“I tell people I have a ton of sharks, and they keep thinking I’m joking,” Clerkin said. “It was an actual ton. I brought back 350 sharks.”

What’s even cooler is that if any of the strange sharks are entirely new species? Clerkin gets to name them. He’s said that he’ll name a few after his mentors and possibly one after his mom and maybe himself.

We can hear his intro now…”I’m Paul Clerkin. You may not know me. A species of shark bears my name.”
Awesome.
[See a photo gallery of these weird sharks via OurAmazingPlanet.Com]
[MSNBC]

A man named Luke Tipple, marine biologist most recognizably known for his work on the Discovery Channel, attached a laser beam to a shark. It was temporary. The laser was the lowest powered model produced by Wicked Lasers, which promoted the feat. The lemon shark was unharmed.

There was even a bit of scientific value, Tipple experimented with a new kind of clap that could be used in future tracking research.

Awesome right? Not so much, for some critics who found the stunt disrespectful to the animal.

“Is there a point of it? It has to have an objective,” Neil Hammerschlag, an assistant professor with the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, told Wired.

“I would say the attachment process sounds non-invasive,” Hammerschlag said. “I don’t think it’s going to cause any damage to the shark. It’s temporary. In terms of the goal, without knowing the specific scientific or educational application, it’s hard to say. But if this is just to respond to a scene in the Austin Powers movie, I don’t see value. You’re just causing unnecessary stress on the animal. It’s not respectful.”

This is why we can’t have anything nice. Like sharks. With frickin laser beams. On their head.

[Wired]

“While wobbegongs eating sharks has been recorded before from stomach contents, this is the first time it has been photographed in action.”

[NewScientist]

This is a water hazard I can get behind.

[io9 via Sky News and YouTube]

The recent floods in Australia have provided new hunting ground for bull sharks. Recently, two bull sharks have been spotted swimming past the McDonald’s restaurant in Goodna.

“It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street.”

“It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway,” Cr Tully said.

[The Chronicle]

When Humphrey Simmons went fishing recently he didn’t expect to catch a shark, and he definitely didn’t expect the the shark to burp up the remains of a human being. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

When Simmons caught the shark a friend who was with him shot the shark several times. What happened next was shocking:

“We tied the rope around his tail fin, and pulled him towards the boat. We were going to cut the hook out of his mouth and let him go when he regurgitated a human foot — intact from the knee down.”

The body has been identified as a missing sailor. Play the slideshow below for several pictures of the grizzly sight (WARNING: Not for the squeamish!):

[The Tribune]

We now know when sharks are most likely to tear us apart.

Shark attacks are most likely to occur on Sunday in less than 6 feet of water during a new moon, a new study finds. And there’s good reason: That’s when a lot of surfers are in the water. Not coincidentally, surfers wearing black-and-white suits are most likely to be attacked.

Saturdays come in second place, and Fridays make a pretty good showing too, “reflective of people skipping work and taking three-day weekends,” explained George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.

The scribbling you hear is the frantic rerouting of my cousin’s Sunday moonlight water wedding under a new moon.

[Yahoo]

What’s worse than a brutal killing machine with no remorse? An invisible brutal killing machine with no remorse.

A new study claims that ten percent off all sharks are “luminous,” meaning they produce a light which combined with normal water refraction allows them to appear invisible. Now the inevitable death suffered by loopy drunk hoes in the first five minutes of Jaws can be achieved with heretofore unknowable stealth.

This shark’s shimmer originates from light emitting organs called photophores from underneath its body, “effectively creating a glow from that region,” said Claes, a researcher in the Laboratory of Marine Biology, Earth and Life Institute at the Catholic University of Louvain.

“Since many predators have upward-looking eyes, it is a common method of camouflage in the mesopelagic zone (from 656 to 3,281 feet below the surface), although it is the first time it is demonstrated in sharks,” he added.

Curious to know what folks in regions where these sharks prey thought has happening to hapless halved swimmers who would wash ashore.

“We can’t see any sharks. Maybe the dreaded sea-faring Kevin James has returned!”

[Discovery by way of Gizmodo]