Fuzzy and Nutty have been hard at work bringing
you their first official season jam- packed
with brand new episodes, so we thought it
was only fair to send them on a well- deserved
vacation.
Many exotic tropical locales offer tourists
a unique opportunity, the chance to swim with,
and feed, small baby sharks!
While everyone knows just how deadly their
grown up cousins are, just how dangerous are
baby sharks, and what would happen if you
were attacked by 100 of them at once?!
It's time to cut this vacation short and find
out!
Shark eggs can take anywhere from a few months
to a year to develop, but some, like the rare
frilled shark can take as much as three and
a half years to fully develop!
Once out of their eggs though, every single
shark comes out a top predator, because mother
sharks don't stick around to care for their
young.
That means a baby shark needs to be ready
to fend for itself the moment it's born, and
it comes ready with all the powerful senses
of its grown-up counterparts.
While having poor eyesight, sharks have an
incredible sense of smell, and some can even
detect the electric energy generated by a
swimming fish heart's and muscles, which lets
it poinpoint prey even in deep, dark water
or inside caves- favorite hunting grounds
of baby sharks.
Along with their fully developed senses though,
baby sharks come with a full set of teeth-
as many as 50 in all- and ready to deliver
tiny little death bites to prey ranging from
small fish to shrimps and squids or octopus.
So just how dangerous are baby sharks, and
what if you were attacked by 100 of them at
once?
Well, the first point to consider is the teeth-
pun fully intended.
Most adult shark teeth are triangular and
serrated, made for sawing chunks of meat off
a dead fish or even a whale.
Baby shark teeth on the other hand are often
conical though, with sharp tips designed to
puncture deep into flesh and hold squirming
prey in place.
Sizes vary by species, everything from just
a few millimeters to as much as a quarter
of an inch for a juvenile great white shark!
Which is well short of the three-plus inch
teeth of an adult, but when you consider that
it has as many as 50 of these sharp little
teeth, that's a lot of ouch in one mouth!
The threat with being attacked by 100 baby
sharks isn't necessarily going to be them
causing massive damage to your body, they're
babies and too tiny to have much strength
or biting power yet!
The real danger though comes from those 50
tiny teeth digging into your flesh over and
over again, specially if they happen to bite
you in certain parts of your body.
Areas such as the skull and ribs are protected
by hard bone which their tiny teeth won't
do much against, and other areas such as the
buttocks, outer thighs and even the stomach
can have layers of fatty tissue that protect
internal organs or major blood vessels.
However, there are several places where these
major blood vessels run close to the surface
of the skin, such as the inner wrist, the
ankle, side of the neck, and inner thigh.
These places all have major vessels that are
well within the biting range of a tiny shark
tooth, and puncturing one of these vessels-
specially the femoral artery which runs along
the inside of your thigh, would lead to you
very quickly bleeding out.
Baby sharks don't pose much of a serious threat
to a person, but if you were swarmed by 100
of them at once, it's guaranteed that one
of them would eventually find one of these
critical spots and do some serious damage.
Luckily you don't have much to fear from sharks
until they're grown up, and even then you
don't really have much to fear anyways because
sharks are definitely not man eaters.
Generally speaking as long as you leave a
shark alone, it'll leave you alone too as
it looks for a delicious fish to feast on,
so when summer comes back around don't be
afraid to hop back in the water!
