For seven weeks now, hundreds upon hundreds of leopard shark corpses have been washing up on the beaches of San Francisco Bay, turning the City by the Bay into the “Dead Shark Capital of California.” A similar incident occurred in 2011, when the beautiful beaches of San Francisco Bay were choked with the fetid corpses of leopard sharks. Similar die-offs have been reported going back to 1967. Okihiro’s necropsy found that the sharks were being killed by infections, for the most part. When a marine animal like a shark gets an infection,
it’s usually been caused by dirty and diseased water. But the water in the San Francisco Bay is famously clean, which has made the cause of this phenomenon a mystery. Other marine animals, like manta rays and halibuts, have also been turning up, but the majority of the dead are leopard sharks. “We can’t actually keep up with the volume of calls we get on a day-to-day basis,” said Sean Van Sommeran, executive director and founder of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, to SF Gate. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re only seeing a fraction of the actual losses.” READ MORE
