Word: gathers
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...observing sharks repeatedly over the years, Klimley was able to solve the long-standing mystery of why hammerheads gather in schools. It's clearly not for protection, since nothing preys on what Klimley calls "the big tough guys of the ocean." It turns out that they gather, at least in part, for an elaborate mating ritual, in which large, dominant females fight their way to the center of the school. The males know which females are most desirable by their position in the pack...
...metal-rich seamount, he found, has a particularly strong magnetic field. So do bands of ancient congealed lava that radiate from the seamount like spokes from a wheel. The hammerheads, he believes, can detect this magnetism and use it for navigation. The seamount is essentially a depot: the hammerheads gather there before going out to their feeding grounds...
...once a fishing hot spot is pinpointed by sonar, satellite-navigation systems enable vessels to return unerringly to the same location year after year. In this fashion, fishermen from New Zealand to the Philippines have been able to home in on orange roughy and giant groupers as they gather to spawn, in some cases virtually eliminating entire generations of reproducing adults...
...amplified the destructive power of modern fishing more than anything else is its gargantuan scale. Trawling for pollock in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, for example, are computerized ships as large as football fields. Their nets--wide enough to swallow a dozen Boeing 747s--can gather up 130 tons of fish in a single sweep. Along with pollock and other groundfish, these nets indiscriminately draw in the creatures that swim or crawl alongside, including halibut, Pacific herring, Pacific salmon and king crab. In similar fashion, so-called longlines--which stretch for tens of miles and bristle with...
...Often there just aren't enough people to gather the information you need," says Carlos Avalle, an electronics engineer based in California, who helped plan the recent occultation study. "With the right amateurs, you can get a lot of science done...