The name “Bull shark” comes from the shape of the shark’s snout, which is short and blunt. It may also come from the aggressive nature of the shark. Some people think that the Bull shark is more dangerous than the Great White or Tiger shark. I imagine that the reason for this is because the Bull shark is at home in both fresh and salt water, and has been found in the Mississippi River, Amazon River, and Lake Nicaragua in Central America. Have you seen the Picante salsa ad where the grizzled old man sits down at a lunch counter and tells the two women a tale about River sharks? Now you know-a Bull shark is a River shark. Just a bit of trivia for you. The Bull shark is also called Freshwater Whaler, Estuary Whaler, and Swan River Whaler, cub, Ganges, Zambezi, shovelnose, slipway grey, square-nose, and Van Rooyen’s shark.
While a number of attacks on humans have been documented,(click on these links: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/att... http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn... it has become a common practice in the Cuban tourist trade to offer “Dive with the Sharks” tours. In his article "The Bull Sharks of Santa Lucia"http://www.deeperblue.net/content/1998/t... writer and photographer Greg Kerr retells his experience of diving and petting Bull sharks.
Sharks, like almost any other animal, can be conditioned to respond to humans without aggression. No one can “tame” a shark. Their nature is not the same as a dolphin or sea otter. No bond really grows with the diver and shark in these outings. Even so, sharks are not dumb. They know that divers equal fish, so they’ll come around.
That’s the problem with the tour dives and boat tours where the tourists can feed the sharks-the sharks are used to it and rely on it. They can forget how to hunt on their own, and can begin to show aggression when feeding patterns are changed or cut down. It’s not in a shark’s best interest to “hand feed” it in the wild. It’s necessary to “target feed” a shark in an aquarium,
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