And what likely did them in.
Ask your favorite shark-obsessed 8-year-old for a fun fact, and the odds are good that they’ll tell you that bull sharks can live in the ocean or in fresh water. Dozens of shark species can briefly enter brackish or fresh water, andmore commonly known as the river shark, spends almost its whole life in fresh water. But the ability to happily take up residence in one kind of environment or the other, salty or not, is rare among fish.
Osmosis—the tendency of water to flow from an environment with less salt to one with more—means that water is removed more quickly from an animal’s cells in the ocean than it is in other environments. Species that evolved to handle this pressure typically don’t do well in lakes. The fascinating physiological ability to handle different osmotic circumstances has allowed bull sharks to travel to some interesting places. They’ve been seen as far up the Mississippi River as Illinois, as well as hundreds of miles up the Amazon. However, they’re still typically found in coastal waters; it was unknown exactly how long they could take up residence in bodies of water that are firmly inland. Now we have something of an answer.
in the journal Marine and Fishery Sciences, a population of bull sharks survived in fresh water for at least 17 years. Their home: an Australian golf course’s water hazard.During the 1990s, several major flooding events connected the golf course’s ponds with the nearby Logan and Albert rivers, which, at about 50 miles from the ocean, arebull shark nursery areas. Soon after, golfers began to report several unusual sightings.
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