Reply #150: Many years ago, when I was a poor college student, [View All]

[MineralMan]

I used to bow fish for sharks in the little bay near my house. I ate the things until I could no longer stand the taste of shark. Anyhow, the sharks in the bay reached sizes up to 6 feet. When I'd return from fishing with the catch, I'd butcher the sharks on an old table in my yard.

Invariably, a crowd of children would come over to watch, along with every cat in the neighborhood. So, I turned it into a biology lesson, basically dissecting the sharks for the kids, naming the organs, etc. The fascination was universal. The sharks in the bay were live-bearers, and the time when they could be hunted was during the season when they came into the bay's backwaters to give birth to their young.

Most of the time, the females had almost completely developed young in them, complete with a transparent egg, yolk, and blood vessels through an umbilical cord of sorts to the young. This was the most fascinating thing for the kids, along with the stomach contents of the shark. A couple of the kids would always want one of these, still in it's transparent egg sac, to take to school for show and tell.

Lots of "Eeeews!" of course, but always from kids who were crowded in to watch the process.

Children aren't automatically repulsed by such things. In fact, I never saw a kid who was during all those sessions. And they'd keep coming back, each time I brought sharks home. The crowd grew, as they told their friends what was going on.