SNORKELING guides usually get an extra tip if a nurse shark swum past while they are conducting an underwater tour. Now, two of these sea creatures, which go by the scientific name Ginglymostoma cirratum, are on display at the Montego Bay Marine Park.

The mammals were recently stuffed and placed on exhibit after they were found washed up on the beach of a nearby Montego Bay hotel about two months ago. And while environmentalists at the park would much prefer live animals in their natural habitat, the stuffed animals now present a wonderful opportunity to teach the general public about nurse sharks.

“We’ve put them in a display area and as the kids come through we just show them these nurse sharks that were found in the bay. They will be used as an educational tool,” explained the park’s science officer, Andrew Ross.

“In Montego Bay, the dive folks see nurse sharks, at best, once a year. They’re certainly not common in the Montego Bay Marine Park, but as you go either east or west of the park area they tend to get more common,” he added.

The two sharks’ cause of death still remains a mystery, but Ross has his own theory. He believes they were caught in fishing nets and then washed ashore where their lifeless bodies rested a few metres from each other.

“There was a very vague autopsy performed,” he said. “There were no distinct causes of trauma or death or anything like that. There were two of them of almost identical size, found side by side; but there were no perforations of skin or anything like that, no obvious caving in or bleeding in the face or anything like that. In all likelihood they died in a fisherman’s trap somehow.”

He added that nurse sharks do not usually die if are held still when they are removed from the water. So, his theory is that they died from an inability to breathe properly.

“Either they died in the trap or a fisherman gave them a wallop as he pulled them out of the trap and threw them back into the sea. Nurse sharks don’t die when you hold them still, they’re still able to breathe so either they somehow got trapped and couldn’t breathe properly or they were done in as they came to surface,” Ross said.

The stuffed sharks are the latest additions to the park’s resource centre. There is no entry charge and the public can use the facility to source a wide variety of environmental material.

“We have a fabulous library, we have the Internet available, we have a video library, a TV and video machine, as well as copies of most, if not all, of the scientific reports ever done in the Montego Bay park area. Plus, there are all sorts of stuff from all around Jamaica,” Ross said. “There’s not quite as much traffic as we’d like to see day-to-day. But we do get quite a few students coming in through school groups. And interested people will wander through.”