A giant power plant with billowing smoke might not look like the most natural habitat for sea life, but the hot water gushing from an industrial plant in Israel’s northern city of Hadera has drawn schools of sharks that are increasingly endangered by overfishing in the Mediterranean Sea.
Now the hotspot is also drawing tourists.
Sandbar and dusky sharks have been sighted around the power plant for decades, but scientists only started collecting data two years ago.
Although they are still trying to count the smatterings of sharks nearby, researcher Aviad Scheinin said the hundreds flocking exclusively to the Hadera power plant every winter qualifies as “a legitimate and rare phenomenon.”
“The paradox that we see here is that this is not a natural environment ... and you cannot see it anywhere else in the vicinity,” said Scheinin, manager of the top predator project at the Morris Kahn Marine Research Station, established by the University of Haifa. “This phenomenon is influenced and created by men, both with the power plant and the sea’s increasingly warm water.”
The shifting climate of the Mediterranean Sea has been creating a bizarre boon for sharks, which thrive in and chase warm water. Expert say the warm water stimulates shark metabolisms, improves their breathing cycles and facilitates their pregnancies.
“The spectacle is logical, but still very mysterious,” said Alen Soldo, copresident of the Shark Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland.
He said the power plant’s water temperature — warmer than the rest of the sea — is what likely attracts the sharks to Hadera from deeper, colder waters during the winter season.
Beyond this, though, a great deal remains unknown.
“We know sharks love this water and we can hypothesize, but we can’t say with certainty exactly why,” he said.
Soldo added that although he had not heard of sharks congregating at power plants outside Israel, he could name a few other Mediterranean hotspots, such as coral reefs near Beirut, where sharks swarm in a similarly random way, perhaps driven by salinity and temperature levels.
“The winters are not as cold as they used to be here and they are no longer a limiting factor for sharks,” Scheinin said. “Many new shark species are coming to the eastern Mediterranean from colder areas and establishing populations.”
“It’s ironic that all of our knowledge of sharks currently comes from the very fisheries that are threatening them,” said Eyal Bigal, the laboratory manager of the project.
The Morris Kahn Station’s top predator team is working to change this, pulling together the first comprehensive body of data about the understudied and endangered Mediterranean shark species.
Overfishing has depleted the Mediterranean shark population by more than 90 percent since the 1950s, researchers say.
An absence of top predators imperils the balance of the entire marine ecosystem.
“If you erase the ones at the top, the food chain will collapse,” Soldo said. “New species may emerge and start preying on populations crucial to human food security. Whole life forms may go extinct.”
Scheinin said studying the sharks in Hadera could be a harbinger that “helps us assess what will happen to different species when waters elsewhere reach the temperatures we have here now.”
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