During more than 25 years studying a variety of fish, including sharks, James Sulikowski has had to solve all kinds of problems. Among the trickiest and most important: How do you gather data about pregnant sharks without first killing them?
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“The catch-22 is that you need the information to better manage them, but in order to get the information [you used to have to] kill them. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Sulikowski, a professor at the University of New England in Biddeford, said. “So that’s where my sort of science came in. We treated sharks basically like pregnant females, like human beings. How are humans studied? Well, you take blood and you can look at that blood for circulating levels of hormones [to determine if the female is pregnant].”
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That idea morphed into taking special waterproof, veterinary-grade ultrasound equipment onto boats and examining sharks that later would be released alive.
That kind of newly available data on shark reproduction made Sulikowski and his colleagues rock stars in the shark world and drew the interest of the Discovery Channel.
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