As Simon McKinley dropped down in the water, everything went dark. He’d seen sharks from the surface but now—gradually descending on his scuba dive—so many scalloped hammerheads were schooling together that they were blocking the sunlight. “You couldn't turn anywhere without seeing a shark,” he says.
McKinley, a spatial ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, was surveying shark populations at the remote Darwin and Wolf Islands in the Galápagos. It’s “one of the sharkiest places in the world,” he says. That also makes it a notably healthy ecosystem in which marine life can thrive.
Original Article: Sharks are thriving in some marine parks—but not others. Why?
