How nearly 5,000 shark jaws ended up in the hands of Cal State Long Beach scientists

Marine biologist Gwen Goodmanlowe, a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach, remembers wondering if she bit off more than she could chew after seeing 27 boxes stacked in her garage, holding an estimated 5,000 shark jaws that needed to be identified and cataloged.

“I thought, ‘we’re in trouble here’,” she said, recalling that day last June.

Goodmanlowe and a team of students took up the daunting task of identifying the thousands of shark jaws, which were handed over in boxes by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in Torrance.

Federal officials were concerned that specimens in the boxes could include endangered species, and sought out help from shark experts to identify them.

“It’s kind of sad it had to be this way, that they fished out all these sharks,” she said. “But you can get some good out of it as well.”

Illegal catch

The boxes of teeth, which came from southeast Asia, were labeled “bull sharks.” And if all of the shark jaws were indeed bull sharks, they would have made it through inspection into the United States, and the jaws put on shelves at souvenir shops. That species of shark is legal to catch.

Officials first contacted Shark Lab director Chris Lowe for help identifying the jaws; however he already had a full schedule.

But Lowe mentioned the project to his wife, Goodmanlowe, a full-time lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences, who showed interest in cataloging the specimens.

“I figured it was going to be a summer project,” she said.

But she soon realized: “We don’t know what we’re doing.”

She got in touch with Florida Fisheries Consultants and shark expert Mark Harris, who consulted with them on what to look for to identify different species.

“When you look at a drawing of a tooth in a book, it looks nothing like that. The upper and lower teeth are different. It took us four months to get a handle on it,” she said of the project, which altogether took six months to complete.

Some species have different teeth depending on the sex of the shark, she said.

She enlisted two students to help with the project, undergraduate Lisa McWilliams and graduate student Taylor Smith. Other students chipped in.

Eventually, twenty different species of shark were identified.

Among the boxes were three illegal catches: scalloped hammerheads, the smooth hammerheads and the silky sharks.

“Most of the jaws were legal to import; but there were a couple hundred that weren’t,” Lowe said. “It just promotes the illegal capture of the species, the population is in trouble. The goal of this whole project is to better educate the public.”

“Someone might say, ‘I have a nephew or niece who love sharks, I’m going to buy that.’ But what if it’s an illegal shark that’s on the road to extinction? We can educate consumers.”

School of sharks

Goodmanlowe hopes that schools or museums might want to use the specimens for educational purposes.

Jaws given to schools will be delivered with information to help teachers explain shark biology, ecology and the food chain.

“We put together a curriculum,” Lowe said.

Educators may request jaws from the campus’ Shark Lab.

One question remains unanswered — where the sharks came from, something researchers might be able to figure out through genetic testing.

“That’s the other part we’d love to be able to answer,” Lowe said. “That’s not easy. It’s not impossible, but those tests get expensive.”

In the end, the illegally fished sharks have become a teaching opportunity.

“It’s not all doom and gloom, because we can now send these to students and have them learn about sharks,” Goodmanlowe said.