Commentary on emotion in sharks

What is it about?

During my six and a half year long ethological study of blackfin reef sharks in French Polynesia, for a period of four months, the resident sharks and their visitors displayed an intensifying negative emotion towards me through swift close approaches, charges, and continuous circling. Eventually it broke out in violence when the sharks battered my kayak on my arrival at the study site. Eventually, underwater, three of them slammed me personally. Two years later, during the period in which they were being systematically massacred for shark fin soup, I was unable to visit them for two months. When I finally returned, they undulated against my kayak in what seemed to be a display of positive emotion. The complex behaviours they displayed have been reported nowhere else.

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Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash