Weapons made from shark teeth are completely badass, and hint at lost shark diversity

I was at the Ecological Society of America’s Annual Meeting when I saw this tweet:

As you might imagine, I did check out that talk.

For those of you who are wondering how you weaponise shark teeth, which are already regenerating, serrated meat knives at the business end of a streamlined, electric-sensing torpedo, here’s how. You drill a tiny hole in them, and then bind them in long rows to a piece of wood to make a sword. Or a trident. Or a four-metre-long lance. And then, presumably, you hit people really hard with them.

That’s what the people of the Gilbert Islands have been doing for centuries. Sharks are an ingrained part of their culture and their teeth have been an ingrained part of their weapons. Tiger sharks feature heavily – they have thick, cleaver-like teeth that can slice through turtle shells so they make a good cutting edge. But the weapons also include the teeth from spottail, dusky and bignose sharks (you can identify species from their teeth), and none of these actually live around the Gilbert Islands today.

Drew, who studied 124 of these weapons, says that their teeth reveal a “shadow diversity” – traces of sharks that disappeared from the surrounding waters before we even knew they were there. I wrote about this story for Nature News – head over there for the full details.