Shark-A-Talk...

Today was another fun day.. We decided to cook special dinner with a couple of my Glasgow friends.. some of us in Biology and Environmental Sciences and some in Geography.. we all had some very interesting conversations... one of which included sharks!! Sharks can be pretty scary.. we all have seen them in the movies.. but are they really scary?? ..if you think about it.. they are more scared of us... and generally, Sharks are not a threat to humans! but Humans are a threat to sharks!....or maybe Octopus are... haha.. pretty cool hu?...but anyway..

Generally, I find them fascinating!!.. I remember one of my Ichthyology class labs in my undergraduate, where we had to do a shark anatomy. The surface of their skin has an amazing texture.. I can still remember what it felt like when I first touched it. No wonder why people are Biomimicking Sharks... ..but the point was that while talking about sharks, the presence of sharks in Greece came up in our conversation and it made me think.. what species of sharks do we have there? and is there a dangerous species that we should be aware of?...Searching for shark attacks in the Greek waters I found some interesting information... I never thought Greek waters could have any chance of shark attack to human. I've always swam thinking I was 100% sure a shark wouldn't attack me.. because when I was a kid, my mom always told me.. there are no sharks in Greece!! But as a biologist, I found out that there are plenty of Mediterranean Shark species..and some of them love swimming in the Greek clean blue waters. So I found out that there are 47 different species of shark inhabiting the Mediterranean Sea.

Archipelagos a Greek marine research organization seems to have some interesting facts and pictures of sharks caught in the Greek waters. They also discuss certain issues about a number of shark species being in danger. Once again I got lost in the world of internet trying to find further information about Greek sharks.. Greek politicians would be considered a dangerous shark species...but we obviously can't fit them in the phylogenetic tree of sharks. An interesting database for sharks was found in this site: http://www.shark.ch/ ...I won't use it today, but I think it might be a useful site for further reference. I'll definitively need to look up some of the species one day, or maybe use the data to make a tree.. Later I tried using iSpecies and searched for a couple of species that were found in the Mediterranean, but also found in Greek waters. Looking at their distribution in GBIF, for most species I looked for I could not see dots in the Mediterranean Sea, and I could not find any distribution around the Greek waters, so that made me wonder.. Is GBIF not collecting data from researchers in Greece? or is it just that there is no shark data from that area? ...because obviously sharks are found in Greek waters (M.Karagiannis, 2009)..