Sand Tiger Shark
Lifestyle
Sand tiger sharks generally swim solo, but some may travel in groups of up to 20. They are most active at night, and tend to stick inside caves or near cliffs during the day. There, they can hover at the top of the water by gulping air and holding it in their stomachs—making them extra buoyant. Otherwise, because their bodies are very dense, they would sink to the bottom. Sand tiger sharks leave their summer homes of shallow coastal waters for deeper ones in the winter.
Food
Sand tiger sharks are nighttime carnivores whose teeth are best fit for small ocean creatures such as squid, crabs, lobster, rays, smaller sharks, and bony fish. Sometimes the sharks get together to gang up on a school of fish.
Some of My Neighbors
Rays, great white sharks, dolphins, bluefish, herring, eels, snapper, hake, squid, crabs, lobsters, whales, coral
Life Cycle
The beginning of a sand tiger shark’s life cycle includes both eggs and live birth. Babies develop within eggs that the mother carries in two uteruses. The shark “pups” hatch inside both compartments and the biggest ones eat any unhatched eggs and smaller pups. By the time the pups are ready to be born after 8 to 9 months, only one or two remain.
The 3-foot-long pups are usually born in the winter. They are able to fend for themselves and don’t require any parental care. However, it takes a long time—4 to 6 years—for them to be mature enough to breed. At that age, males have reached 6 feet in length and females are about 7 feet. The oldest sand tiger shark on record, Bertha, who resided at the New York Aquarium, lived into her forties.
Population Status & Threats
Sharks of many different species are being severely overhunted, largely from commercial fisheries that seek them out for their meat and fins to produce delicacies such as shark fin soup, a prized meal in some Eastern cuisines. Sharks are also killed for their teeth and jaws, which are used decoratively or as trophies. The rate at which these majestic predators are being fished out of the seas could have serious consequences for the integrity of marine ecosystems.
For sand tiger shark populations, overfishing is especially hard to recover from because so few young are born at a time and they take so long to mature. Because of its low reproduction rate, the sand tiger is listed as vulnerable and is protected by different countries through much of its range.
WCS Conservation Efforts
New York Aquarium and WCS research scientist Dr. Hans Walters has been attaching pop-up satellite transmitters to wild sand tiger sharks off the coasts of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and South Carolina since 2000. Data from these transmitters give him a 3D picture of the tagged sharks’ travels. This project is the first to track the long-range movements of this species. The information it provides may assist government agencies in their efforts to develop better and more consistent conservation strategies for sand tigers and other large coastal sharks in the western Atlantic Ocean.