{"id":42989,"date":"2024-10-22T20:25:05","date_gmt":"2024-10-22T18:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ce4af54e-289f-4c73-9cac-67ebffbada54"},"modified":"2024-10-22T21:27:25","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T19:27:25","slug":"how-do-sharks-mate-shark-sex-is-a-rarely-seen-but-lively-business-heres-how-they-do-it","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/rss_feed\/how-do-sharks-mate-shark-sex-is-a-rarely-seen-but-lively-business-heres-how-they-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How do sharks mate? Shark sex is a rarely seen but lively business \u2013 here\u2019s how they do it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just how do sharks mate? Stuart Blackman explains <\/p>

By <\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 22 October 2024 at 18:25 PM<\/p>

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Sex <\/a>is a staple of wildlife documentaries, to the point that the ins and outs of the love lives of a multitude of mammals<\/a>, birds<\/a>, reptiles<\/a> and invertebrates<\/a> have been revealed in all their intimate detail. And yet the private lives of fish have remained largely just that \u2013 private. <\/strong><\/p>

There are at least two good reasons for this. First, most fish don\u2019t actually mate, and second, those that do seem to have a knack for doing it when nobody\u2019s pointing a camera at them. Sharks<\/a> belong to the second category.<\/p>

How do sharks mate?<\/h2>

Together with closely related skates<\/a> and rays<\/a>, sharks form a group called the elasmobranchs, one of the two main lineages of modern fishes \u2013 the other being the bony fishes, which include the majority of freshwater and marine species. The two groups went their separate ways about 450 million years ago and differ significantly in terms of both anatomy (elasmobranchs\u2019 skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone, for example) and reproductive strategies.<\/p>

Most bony fish go for quantity over quality, producing large numbers of small offspring, each of which are highly unlikely to survive to maturity. With few exceptions, they eject their eggs and sperm straight into the water, leaving fertilisation and the entirety of their progeny\u2019s development to chance.<\/p>

Sharks and other elasmobranchs, though, focus their efforts on a smaller number of offspring. This starts with fertilisation of the eggs within the body of the female. Males don\u2019t have a penis as such, but evolution has equipped them with something (or, rather, two things) just as effective \u2013 elongated extensions of the paired pelvic fins, called claspers, which channel sperm<\/a> from the male\u2019s genital opening into the female\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>