Offspring of one of world's biggest bull sharks found—why that’s so surprising
The thousand-pound mother, named Big Bull, could be one of the last of her kind on the U.S. Atlantic coast.
Marine ecologist Neil Hammerschlag has caught and released a lot of sharks in his day. But there’s no question the most memorable was the thousand-pound female bull shark named Big Bull, one of the largest specimens on record.
“It literally took my breath away,” says Hammerschlag, director of the Shark Research and Conservation Program at the University of Miami. “It wasn’t so much the length, but the girth. It had this neck that was just bulging, like a wrestler.” Most bull sharks are around seven feet long—Big Bull was 10 feet. (What can studying the world’s biggest sharks tell us?)
When Hammerschlag and his team took non-invasive blood and tissue samples of the bull
