Silflay Hraka

A: Yes, sharks do have tongues. No, they don’t bite them.

Sharks’ tongues (some experts call the tongues of fishes basihyals) are short pieces of cartilage that don’t seem to serve much of a porpoise. They don’t bite them, but they don’t really taste with them, either. And sadly, french kissing is not part of the shark lifestyle.

“Sometimes their tongues get full of stingray spines,” said shark expert Frank Schwartz of the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences. Schwartz has studied sharks and marine life for nearly 50 years and is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on sharks.

Schwartz said scientists have found sharks with up to 52 stingray spines stuck in their tongues and lips.

“Does that hurt the shark?” I asked.

“I don’t think it feels good,” he said.

“Don’t cookie cutter sharks use their tongues for eating?” I asked.

“Not really. They use their jaws to suck out their prey’s flesh,” he said.

“Why do they call them cookie cutter sharks?” I asked.

“They bite into a whale’s side and spin, cutting out a round cookie of flesh they suck out. Just like when your mother made cookies.”

“That’s not how my mother made cookies,” I said. “What other weird stuff do sharks do?”

Schwartz: “Nurse sharks swim into fresh water and lay on the bottom for hours or days. Just resting.”

Me: “Why do they call them nurse sharks?”

Schwartz: “Someone must have thought they looked like nurses. They’re pretty little things. But the 14-foot ones can be real bad.”

Me: “So the big nurses are mean?”

Schwartz: “Right. Some scuba divers like to grab them by the tail.

Me: “They grab the nurses?”

Schwartz: “Right, and the sharks wheel around and bite the living daylights out of them.”

Me: “Don’t you have to be pretty stupid to grab a 14-foot shark by the tail?”

But at Sea Center, the temperature and amount of light are manipulated to make the fish think the year is only 150 days long, causing them to produce more baby fish every year.

Rows of gray Fiberglas tanks make breeding rooms look more like a brewery than a fish farm. Piping snakes through the big room and the sound of valves, pumps and circulating water fills the air.

Hanging from an electric wire over each group of four tanks is a small night light used to simulate moonlight and to put the fish in romantic moods.

When the fish get ready to mate the deep thumping and drumming that give the species its name adds to the sounds. The male and female will dance and thump into each other as the female releases millions of eggs and the male releases his milt.

Eggs are separated and taken to smaller tanks in other rooms where they hatch within a day. The eggs and newborn hatchlings are so tiny that they look like fine brown sand suspended in the water.

They grow quickly, and in a few days look like minnows and are transferred to one-acre outdoor ponds. In little more than a month, they grow to more than an inch and are released into coastal waters.