Shane Gross's Image

Shane woke at dawn to the sound of splashing. Scrambling out of his tent, he spotted ‘a pile of 14 nurse sharks thrashing around in knee-deep water’. He had seen them heading for the shallows the evening before, and so had camped out on the beach. He managed to capture the gaze from the tiny eyes of the mating pair amid the chaos.

Nurse shark mating is not a gentle affair. The male bites the female’s pectoral fin, rolling her over and pinning her to the seabed. Many males often attempt to mate with a single female, who in turn tries to avoid them by swimming into very shallow water, where she can bury her pectoral fins safely in the sand.