This text was initially printed by Hakai Journal.
When a real-estate improvement threatened the stays of a Thirteenth-century coastal fishing web site on southern Brazil’s Santa Catarina Island in 1996, archaeologists rushed to excavate. They quickly collected what they may from the Rio do Meio web site—pottery, instruments, animal stays. The historic web site now sits below a well-liked beachfront property. Fortuitously, although, the artifacts are tucked safely away within the museum on the Federal College of Santa Catarina (UFSC).
About 750 to 500 years in the past, Indigenous peoples journeyed to the realm to fish. Sharks have been an vital a part of their food regimen, and, after a profitable hunt, the fishers would butcher bull sharks, nice white sharks, sand tiger sharks, and different species at Rio do Meio earlier than transporting the meat away. Fortunately for Guilherme Burg Mayer, a graduate pupil in ecology at UFSC, the hunters left the sharks’ severed heads behind. The college museum’s assortment from Rio do Meio contains tooth from not less than eight totally different species—and shark tooth are a treasure chest of knowledge.
In a latest paper, Burg Mayer and his colleague in contrast these excavated tooth with fashionable shark tooth collected in the identical area from 1975 to 2010. Utilizing a technique known as stable-isotope evaluation, which yields insights into an animal’s food regimen and atmosphere, the staff recognized variations between the 2 units of tooth that doubtless replicate how the area’s marine ecosystem has modified over the centuries, and the way sharks have tailored.
“I feel a whole lot of of us simply suppose that shark tooth are triangular pointy issues,” says Sora Kim, a stable-isotope biogeochemist at UC Merced who additionally research shark tooth however wasn’t concerned within the Rio do Meio evaluation. This strategy is comparatively new, Kim says, and scientists can be taught lots from the form and chemistry of shark tooth.
Like human tooth, shark chompers include collagen, a sort of protein that features totally different parts, corresponding to nitrogen and carbon that animals get from their meals. Though scientists can’t inform precisely what an animal has eaten from analyzing its tooth, Burg Mayer’s staff was capable of glean clues in regards to the sharks’ diets and their rankings as predators by evaluating totally different types of nitrogen, known as isotopes, between the 2 dental units. Increased nitrogen-isotope values counsel that an animal is feeding larger on the meals chain—that’s, extra more likely to be consuming carnivorous or herbivorous prey than they’re to be consuming vegetation.
The researchers discovered that, centuries in the past, various kinds of sharks have been feeding on animals that occupied the identical degree of the meals net—prey that lived close to each other and ate comparable issues. Ecologists see such a food regimen overlap as factor, Burg Mayer says, as a result of it factors to a extra resilient meals net the place predators have a number of totally different prey to munch on. If one kind of tasty fish disappears, for instance, sharks have loads of others to eat.
In distinction, the diets of Brazil’s fashionable sharks have little overlap. As a substitute, sharks look like both chowing down on prey that will get little consideration from different sharks or consuming a extra numerous mixture of prey from totally different ranges of the meals net. A potential clarification for this shift, Burg Mayer says, is that sharks have grow to be much less choosy as fish species have declined in quantity, forcing them to snack on new meals. To the researchers, this transformation alerts a much less resilient ecosystem.
When the researchers zeroed in on one species—the sand tiger shark—they discovered that it has moved up the meals chain over time to grow to be one of many ecosystem’s prime predators. Burg Mayer says that fashionable members of the species are choosing their prey from larger on the meals chain as a result of it’s grow to be simpler; there are fewer sand tiger sharks left to compete for the most important and finest meal choices. Sand tiger sharks have been overfished in Brazil for many years and, in 2018, have been declared critically endangered within the area. (Fishing for the species was banned just a few years earlier than, although the meat remains to be bought illegally.)
However, as Kim factors out, stable-isotope evaluation can present solely that modifications have occurred; it could actually’t clarify why. Overfishing could or will not be guilty for sharks’ altering diets. And since sharks frequently lose and regrow their tooth, a single tooth is extra like a snapshot protecting just a few weeks or months of the animal’s life, not its complete life story, she provides. In the end, Kim says, with out further analysis, it’s troublesome to say precisely why sharks are consuming various things now than they have been a number of centuries in the past.
Regardless, the findings replicate a disturbance within the ecosystem that’s value additional investigation, Burg Mayer says. The research additionally showcases the resilience of sand tiger sharks even below difficult situations.
“This explicit group is adaptive to the modifications,” Burg Mayer says. “It’s attempting to outlive.”
