Shark! The Herald Angels Sing.

Sharks are crazy, sharks are weird, sharks are different, and sharks are wonderful. That's not just my opinion. That's the opinion of Dr David Shiffman and he should know. He's been into sharks ever since he was a little kid and he's now a marine conservation biologist living and working in Washington DC. He dedicates, it seems, pretty much his entire life to studying sharks and he's even written a book, 'Why Sharks Matter:A Deep Dive with the World's Most Misunderstood Predator', about them.

He was the speaker at last night's, and 2022's final - hence the lame festive pun in the blog's name, Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk (ably, and jocularly, compered by Brian Eggo from the Glasgow branch of Skeptics) and his talk, 'Why Sharks Matter:the Science and Policy of Saving Threatened Sharks', may have been shorter than normal, about half an hour, but it was full of interesting shark stuff. 

In fact I'd go so far to say we were faced with a veritable sharknado of elasmobranchii related information. Dr Shiffman's job is to use science to study, and protect, fish. Specifically, in his case, sharks - and sharks aren't like other fish.

For a start, they don't have bones. Just cartilage. Which makes them very flexible. So much so that they could, if they wanted to, bite their own tails. All other fish, except other members of the shark family like skates and rays, have bones. You'll know that. You'll have seen their skeletons.

They've other advantages over us bony beings too. Not only can they both see and smell better than us humans, they have an entire sense that we don't. Sharks can sense electromagnetic fields which is just as well as it helps them source food that may, understandably, be hiding from them under mud, sand, or rocks. Hammerhead sharks are particularly good at this. Their large heads acting like metal detectors except they're looking for food rather than lost treasure.

You'll have most likely heard of hammerhead sharks but it seems very unlikely you'd be able to name every type of shark and that's because there are 536 different recognised species and that number continues to grow as new sharks are discovered. Some live in rivers, some live in lakes, some live under ice, and some live so deep in the ocean that they never see any light.

Apart from the light they produce themselves. The megamouth shark has glow in the dark gums! The fantastically named ninja lantern shark tops that by having an entire body that glows. Size wise, sharks range from ones the size of your forearm to ones, as described by Dr Shiffman, the size of "a city bus" and, age wise, some of them can live astonishingly long lives. The Greenland shark can live to be four hundred years old and is such a fearsome predator it eats polar bears and moose.

One was even found with an entire reindeer in its body. It's one of the roughly forty species of shark that can be found in the waters around the UK. Some have even recently returned to the Thames. 

Even when it comes to procreation, sharks don't seem to follow the usual rules. Some sharks lay eggs (called mermaid's purses), some sharks give birth to live baby sharks, and some female sharks simply clone themselves. No need for a male shark to get involved.

Though some female sharks do like the male sharks to get involved - and lots of 'em. Some female sharks will mate with several male sharks and the offspring produced following these shark shagfests are believed to have one mother but several fathers. 'Multiple maternity' they call it. The female sharks do seem to have quite a lot of control over their own destiny and, in some cases, female sharks can defer pregnancy until it is more convenient. They become pregnant but lengthen the gestation period for up to four years if they deem that necessary.

These are things I didn't really know about sharks but one thing I'd heard before is that sharks are very very rarely a threat to humans. That's a myth that began with the book, and later film, Jaws. The author of the book, Peter Benchley, was so upset that his book gave sharks their bad rep that he devoted much of the rest of his life to shark conservation.

While sharks are not a serious threat to humans, humans are most definitely a very big threat to sharks. Many species of shark, roughly a third of all species, are severely threatened and the situation is getting worse. The main reason, overwhelmingly so, is over-fishing. 

In the past people have pointed to the Chinese and their supposed taste for shark fin soup but that is hugely exaggerated. The consumption of shark fin soup has dramatically declined in recent years but shark meat demand has risen massively. While it's easy, and potentially a bit racist - hello Morrissey, to point the finger at China, it's worth noting that the UK is the planet's 20th largest shark fishing nation and the world's 10th largest shark meat exporter.

If you go to your local chippy and opt for the "rock salmon" you're eating a shark. A dogfish specifically. Yet nothing is done about this while at the same time over 60,000 people signed a Facebook petition to ban shark finning in Florida. Which would have been admirable except shark finning is already banned in Florida and has been since 1993.

I felt Dr Shiffman could have talked about sharks all night but then, after a fair bit of amiable self-promotion for both his talks and his book, he wound up surprisingly quickly. There was an interesting Q&A that touched on marine invertebrates like sponges and other "soggy weirdos from the deep below", Gollum's cat shark, duck billed platypuses, Katy Perry, Rodney Dangerfield, megalodons, the kid's song Baby Shark, and QI's theory that there is no such thing as a fish.

When somebody asked Dr Shiffman which of the Sharknado films was his favourite he surprised us all. Half expecting him to dismiss this as a frivolous question, he claimed he'd watched - and enjoyed - all the Sharknado films and, to him, Sharknado 2 was the best one. Even better, he claimed the producers of the Sharknado films funded some of his studies.

Nice! As was the whole evening. Thanks to Dr David Shiffman, thanks to Brian Eggo, and thanks to everyone involved with Skeptics in the Pub - Online for providing me with such interesting and engaging content on the second and fourth Thursday evening every month during 2022. I'll be back in 2023 for a talk about, of all things, flags but, until then, enjoy the festive break. The shark nights are drawing in.