Why So Many Sharks Have Bird Feathers in Their Bellies
Spoiler: Migration is hard.
by Ed Yong
May 21, 2019
3 minutes
Marcus Drymon wasn’t expecting a baby shark to barf up a ball of feathers onto his boat.
The shark’s presence wasn’t the weird bit: Drymon and his team of fisheries ecologists regularly assess fish populations along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, and every year, they’ll catch, weigh, tag, and release thousands of sharks. In 2010, they were doing just that for the meter-long tiger shark when it coughed up the feathers. “Being an ecologist, I scooped them up and took them back to the lab,” Drymon says.
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