New Gulf of Mexico Shark Study Makes Surprising Discovery
Researchers at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, who have been conducting a two year study focusing on the diets of Tiger Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico, have made a surprising discovery: not only are the sharks feeding on fish and other marine organisms, they are also feeding on land-based birds, such as woodpeckers, tanagers, meadowlarks, catbirds, kingbirds, and swallows.
“We were not expecting to see this. It certainly prompts a series of questions, the most obvious being, how does a land bird end up in the water as food for sharks? Certainly, bird migrations across the Gulf are incredibly strenuous treks that result in large numbers of bird deaths over water from exhaustion, but there may be other factors at play here. We’re going to be taking a look at this over the next year and see if there are other causative circumstances that are contributing to these bird deaths,” said lead researcher Dr. Marcus Drymon.
The study findings may lend support to an issue American Bird Conservancy (ABC – the nation’s leading bird conservation organization) has been raising for several years, and which was referenced in a 2005 federal government study Interactions Between Migrating Birds and Offshore Oil and Gas Platforms in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. That study made reference to a bird migration phenomenon in which potentially large numbers of night-migrating birds become fatally attracted to lighted oil and gas platforms.
These avian fatal attractions occur more often on cloudy nights, and can involve hundreds or even thousands of birds that apparently confuse the platform lights with stars by which they navigate. The birds become trapped in a cone of light – either reluctant or unable to leave it and fly into a wall of darkness.
http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/120109.html
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It isn't my cats after all! 
