On Tuesday afternoon, nurse Wanda Kneen prised open the pale underbelly of a small dogfish shark. She ran a scalpel over the stomach pouch, laying its contents bare. She sliced into its liver, and removed its heart, and opened its womb — extracting three baby sharks — and then she pressed a thumb firmly into the shark’s left eye socket until, after a great deal of prying — struggling against about 400 million years of evolutionary gristle — the eye popped free. At that point, standing before a crowd of bellowing fifth and sixth graders — who had gathered to watch the public dissection as part of SAFE BASE’s 2nd Annual Shark Week — Kneen set upon the eyeball with her knife.
“It looks small through the front, but it’s basically a human-sized eyeball,” said Kneen, separating the vitreous orb from the remaining bits of optic nerve.
“And here,” said Kneen—”wait, where is it?” She reached into the shark’s body cavity, which she held parted like a coin purse, and sifted through its innards as calmly as if she were rummaging for a tube of lipstick. “Here it is. Yep. Remember those baby sharks? This is one of their food sacs. These sharks are born live, but they do not get milk from their mothers, like whales do. They feed off of this sac until it’s gone and they’re able to feed on their own or they become food for something else. And then this sac comes off.” Kneen squeezed the sac between her thumb and forefinger. “You see that? It looks like a very soft cheese.” One boy groaned. “Have you ever eaten feta cheese?” asked Kneen. “The one I did yesterday crumbled up like feta cheese.”
The SAFE BASE students ate it up (figuratively), peppering Kneen with fresh questions about the shark’s anatomy every time the nurse’s knife drifted toward a new organ.
The entire demonstration, needless to say, was in the name of science. SAFE BASE, which is in the habit of exposing students to experiences they might otherwise never enjoy, has organized a full week of activities intended to educate scores of Kansas kids about the most famous of ocean-dwelling predators.
The after-school program’s director, Angela Henry, spoke to the 24 students seated in the lecture hall at Allen Community College on Tuesday about the spiny dogfish shark. The dogfish is very aggressive, she told them. They travel in packs of hundreds or thousands and devour whatever is in front of them. Baby dogfish sharks, equipped like their parents with rows of sharp, crushing teeth, will attack a fish two to three times its size. Though small they can travel vast distances. Scientists once tracked a dogfish shark that had traveled from Washington State to the waters around Japan.
One boy, who insisted more than once that Tuesday’s dissection lab smelled like “fishsticks,” asked Henry whether the dogfish shark would attack a human.
“Remember what we’ve learned,” said Henry. “Humans are actually the predators of sharks. On average, six humans die every year from shark attacks. How many sharks die every hour because of humans?” The kids weren’t sure. “11,000. Every hour.”
(The dogfish, it should be noted, is among the most plentiful of the sharks and is frequently used for biological and species research.)
While Kneen did the majority of the slicing, the students — even the ones who mimed disgust at the start of the lesson — were invited to touch the shark after the dissection was done, and, long after the show was over, after the students were led from the lab and loaded onto their bus, they continued to talk excitedly about their shark and its many parts.
