Head turner: whats the point of the hammerheads head if the hammerhead doesn hammer?
Thirty feet underwater, over a sandy patch next to the Great Barrier Reef, is a perfectly ordinary place for a shark to swim. But the student divers I was leading made a din that should have kept a cautious carnivore at a wary distance, so I was surprised when an eight-foot shark glided past. From the side it looked like the other sharks that regularly patrol the reef. As it turned toward us, however, it revealed a grossly expanded and flattened head, and I realized with a rush that this was my first underwater encounter with the great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokkaran). Perhaps no other morphological oddity has inspired so many fanciful–and sensible–theories about its function as has the cephalofoil (the winglike head) of the eight species of hammerhead. Recent experimental evidence supports some ideas and refutes others, while pointing to a previously unsuspected role for this peculiar feature. Hammerhead heads come in many widths and shapes. The winghead shark (Eusphyra blochii,
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