Hammerhead: Shark and Shark Fin Soup Essay

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Introduction
Sharks are one of the most fearsome sea animals. They live in oceans across the world, but are most common in tropical waters. There are more than three hundred fifty species of sharks. The hammerheads are classified as Chondrichthyes, because they are jawed fish with paired fins, paired nares, scales, a heart with its chambers in series, and skeletons made of cartilage instead of bone. There subclass is Elasmobranchii because they have five to seven pairs of gills, rigid dorsal fins and no swim bladders. The order hammerheads are put in is Carcharhiniformes because they are the larger sharks, they have a nictitating membrane over the eye, two dorsal fins, and anal fin and five gill slits. The family they are in is the Sphyrnidae family because of their "cephalofoil" shaped head. They are the easiest shark to tell apart from another. The Hammerheads are among the strangest looking sharks. As the name indicates they have a flattened head which resembles the head of a hammer. Their eyes and nostrils are at the ends of the hammer.
Reproduction
The way sharks reproduce, are all the same because the male goes after the female and continuously bites her until she gives up and has sex with the male. Hammerhead sharks only reproduce once a year but has a lot of pups (baby shark) in a litter (http://www.sharksider.com). Sharks don’t lay eggs like most sea animals, the have actual live babies. The female has a cloaca, which is like a uterus in a human female. And when the male uses his clasper to inject semen into the female’s cloaca, the female fertilizes them .A regular shark has around twelve to fifteen pups at once. A great hammerhead will usually have twenty to forty pups at once (http://www.sharks-world.com). When the parents have the pups they don’t care for them at all. So all of the pups usually all stay together in a group to help each other obtain the food that they require to survive. When the pups are big enough to take care of themselves without anyone being a threat they go off on their own. A type of shark in the same family as the hammerhead shark that was able to reproduce asexually is the Bonnethead or shovelhead shark. This happens because the ovum fuses with a polar body to form a zygote.
Predator/Prey
Hammerhead sharks find their prey by using their eyes on the side of their head as an advantage so they have a greater range of eye sight. One unique sense the hammerhead shark has is the ampullae of lorenzini, which allows the shark to detect electrical fields which is why their favorite food is stingray. Stingrays are easily detected and found when buried because the shark can sense the stingray, find it, then pin it down to the ground with the hammerheads head (http://animals.nationalgeographic.com). Hammerheads also eat a wide range of crustaceans, fish, squids, octopus, and
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