It’s early afternoon. The sun is beating down and mosquitoes are humming. Another decent day’s catch is unloaded, men sweating with the effort. If it weren’t for the breeze, the stench would be unbearable. Today’s tally: more than 100 sharks, some weighing close to 1,000 pounds and reaching nearly 20 feet in length. The catch includes leopard (tiger), dusky, hammerhead, nurse, sand sharks and sawfish—nothing unusual in the shallow (15 feet) waters surrounding Big Pine Key.

For centuries, the Diamond Shoals off North Carolina have been collecting shipwrecks. Hundreds of crumpled merchant vessels swamped by Mother Nature’s fury and scores of battle scarred war machines torn apart by enemy shells loom above the otherwise featureless substrate.

Depending on who you ask, humans are responsible for removing between 20 million and 100 million sharks per year from the oceans. Considered a delicacy in many parts of the world, shark fins are served at Chinese weddings and business dinners throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. The problem with finning is two-fold. First, from a humanitarian aspect, sharks are still alive when their fins are sliced off; the animals are thrown back into the sea, where they’re left to drown. Second, from a practical standpoint, the demand for shark fins will soon outpace the ability of sharks to reproduce—the number of pups in any shark’s litter rarely exceeds 100—and overfishing could have serious effects for both coral reef systems and the entire food chain.

You won’t find Spiny dogfish on most shark diver’s ‘bucket lists’. In fact, the only time that your average diver will come into contact with a dogfish is when it is covered in batter, served with chips and bathed in an artery-constricting amount of salt and vinegar.

How to get out of the protective cage and swim with the Great White shark—that’s what Big Animals expeditions founder and leader, Amos Nachoum, helps the adventurous and steely-nerved diver and underwater photographer do.

Why the peculiar head shape of the hammerhead shark developed as it did has been the subject of much speculation. Few other morphological oddities have inspired so many fanciful and sensible theories about its function as the weirdly shaped head that characterises the hammerhead shark. Recent experimental evidence supports some ideas and refutes others, while pointing to a previously unsuspected role for this peculiar feature.

The attorney strokes the white belly of an eight-foot-long reef shark. This is not a lawyer joke. I’m 70 feet (23 m) deep in the clear blue Caribbean water off Roatan Island with a half dozen scuba divers from Anthony’s Key Resort. We’re at a dive site called “Cara a cara,” which in Spanish means “face-to-face.”

Assembly Bill 376 to protect sharks by limiting shark fin trade in California.

Stuart Cove, Shark Wrangler and yearly feature star of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, is proud to announce the opening of his newest boutique dive operation offering dives with Tiger Sharks at Tiger Beach, West End, Grand Bahama Island!

A great white shark tagged by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has set a world record for the deepest known dive at 1200m