The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that more than a third of the 1,147 shark, ray, and skate species in the world’s oceans face extinction. By collecting and raising babies from females that wind up in fishing nets-most often as bycatch-and then on fishmongers’ counters, the groups hope to make a small difference in a world that has not been kind to sharks. Sharklab-Malta is one of at least three groups around the Mediterranean taking on the unlikely role of nursemaid to several species of sharks and their close relatives, skates. There, Nowell and the team at the organization that he founded, Sharklab-Malta, will try to give each unborn shark another shot at living. Each egg that he finds is dropped carefully into a container of salt water for transport back to his office. As vendors begin scaling bream and filleting grouper around him, he’ll move between plastic totes, each stacked several layers deep with sharks packed in ice, identifying females and feeling for their eggs. Nowell will do this for dozens more sharks before the morning is through. With a pop, it emerges: a tiny egg case, no longer than Nowell’s pinkie finger, yellowish-brown in color and-though it might not look it-likely still thrumming quietly with life. He pushes, gently, encouraging the object back toward the cloaca, the opening shared by the shark’s intestinal, urinary, and reproductive tracts.
#Zombie deep blue shark skin
Where the shark’s skin is thin around its internal organs and womb, Nowell presses inward with a finger and feels something rigid and hard. Surrounded by vendors preparing for the start of their day at the wholesale fish market in Valletta, Greg Nowell carefully runs his fingers along the belly of the shark: a small-spotted catshark, a compact, slender creature only half a meter long, with cream-colored skin covered in a galaxy of black dots.
This is especially strange, not just because it’s happening on land, but because the shark in question is dead. on the island of Malta, and in the stillness before most residents wake to begin their day, a shark is about to give birth.
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