Bull sharks have ‘friends’

University of Exeter

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Adult bull shark ‘Chunky’ (foreground) parallel swimming with subadult female ‘Lady Lazarus’ (background).

view more 

Credit: Natasha D. Marosi

Bull sharks form social relationships with specific “friends”, new research reveals.

Sharks are often viewed as solitary, but the study – carried out on the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji – found that rather than mixing at random, sharks have “active social preferences” and choose their social partners.

The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, University of Lancaster, Fiji Shark Lab, and Beqa Adventure Divers.

“As humans we cultivate a range of social relationships – from casual acquaintances to our best friends, but we also actively avoid certain people – and these bull sharks are doing similar things,” said lead author Natasha D. Marosi, an Exeter researcher and founder of Fiji Shark Lab.

The study is based on six years of observations of 184 bull sharks in three age categories: sub-adult (not yet sexually mature), adult and advanced-adult (post-reproductive age).  

Researchers examined both broad-scale “associations” – measured by individuals remaining within one body length of each other – and fine-scale social interactions such as “lead-follow” and parallel swimming.

Social ties were common between adult sharks, and sharks were most likely to interact with partners of a similar size to themselves.

“Contrary to commonly held perceptions of sharks, our study shows they have relatively rich and complex social lives,” said Professor Darren Croft, from Exeter’s Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour.

“We are only just beginning to really understand the social lives of many shark species. Just like other animals, they likely gain benefits from being social – this may include learning new skills, finding food and potential mates while avoiding confrontations.”

The study found that both sexes preferred to socialise with females. However, males had more social connections on average than females.

“Male bull sharks are physically smaller than females, thus one potential benefit they may gain is by being more socially integrated; they are buffered from aggressive confrontations with larger individuals,” said Marosi.  

It was further found that adult sharks form the “core” of the social network, while the advanced adult and sub-adult sharks were generally less socially connected.

“This study capitalises on data and knowledge from one of the longest running shark ecotourism dive sites in the world. This offered a unique opportunity to observe the detailed behaviour of these individuals over many years, as they grow, develop and manage their social relationships,” said Dr David Jacoby, from Lancaster University’s Lancaster Environment Centre.

Marosi added: “The Shark Reef Marine Reserve is a protected area where large numbers of sharks gather year round, giving us the ability to study individual sharks repeatedly over time.

“Our results show that older sharks tend to be less social.

“These older individuals have many years of experience honing their skill sets, hunting and mating, and sociality may not be as integral to their survival as it is for an individual in their prime.

“Sub-adult bull sharks rarely visit the Reserve. Sub-adults usually occupy near-shore habitats, while juvenile bull sharks can be found in Fiji’s river and estuarine systems. 

“During these early life stages, there is a need to avoid predation – including the threat posed by adult bull sharks.

“We do have some bolder sub-adults at the Reserve, and they have established social ties with some of the adult sharks. These older individuals may act as facilitators for inclusion within the social network, and also possibly provide pathways for social learning.”

Marosi stressed the importance of developing a deeper understanding of sociality within shark species, which she believes can help inform policy frameworks for their management and preservation. Fiji Shark Lab is currently working alongside the Ministry of Fisheries, Fiji to use the study’s valuable information in joint conservation efforts.

The study was funded by Fiji Shark Lab, Hai Stiftung Shark Foundation and the Waitt Foundation.

The paper, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, is entitled: “Rolling in the deep: drivers of social preferences and social interactions within a bull shark aggregation in Fiji.”

Natasha D. Marosi among bull sharks

Credit

Mike Neumann

View from below the bull sharks in the 'Arena’ at Shark Reef Marine Reserve

Credit

Natasha D. Marosi

Journal

Animal Behaviour

DOI

10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123511 

Article Title

Rolling in the deep: drivers of social preferences and social interactions within a bull shark aggregation in Fiji.”

Article Publication Date

16-Mar-2026

The Shield of Monroism: The Angry Tide and the Neo-Colonial Order in Latin America

By Carlos Ron

March 17, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Daniel Torok/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

On 7 March 2026, at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, Donald Trump inaugurated the “Shield of the Americas” summit, convening right-wing leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean’s “Angry Tide” around what he called a ‘counter-cartel coalition’. Washington’s recipe was stated plainly: “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our military.” Monroism is on the offensive, and the Angry Tide has become its shield—not against cartels, but against people-centered projects of national sovereignty.

The invited leaders—Milei of Argentina, Paz of Bolivia, Bukele of El Salvador, Noboa of Ecuador, Asfura of Honduras, Peña of Paraguay, Chaves of Costa Rica, Mulino of Panama, Abinader of the Dominican Republic, Ali of Guyana, Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago, and President-elect Kast of Chile—are all to the right of the political spectrum. Conspicuously absent were the progressive leaders of Latin America’s largest economies: Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Of Mexico, Trump declared: “The cartels are running Mexico. We can’t have that.”

The images from Miami stood in stark contrast to regional gatherings of the last two decades, where Latin American leaders met on equal standing to build frameworks for political coordination and cooperation—such as the Council of South American Defense and the South American Health Council, of UNASUR, for example. In Miami, the assembled presidents competed in a publicity stunt to see who would stand closest to Trump in the photograph or keep the commemorative pen with which he signed the agreements.

Fifty Years of “War on Drug”: A Failed Policy

It is alarming that this coalition commits to deeper collaboration with the United States on fighting cartels, given the balance sheet of US-led drug control. The Addicted to Imperialism study series, co-produced by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research with the Lawfare Observatory, CEPDIPO, and COCCAM, lays out the record with devastating clarity: after more than fifty years of the ‘War on Drugs’, the DEA acknowledged before the US Congress that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone have ‘associates, facilitators and intermediaries in all 50 states of the United States.’ This is the outcome of half a century of the most expensive and militarized drug control effort in human history.

The aggregate data confirms the verdict. In 2023, 316 million people consumed illegal drugs worldwide—a 22 percent increase from a decade prior. The US government has invested over $10 billion in counternarcotics efforts in Colombia since 1999, yet cocaine production more than tripled between 2013 and 2017. The study shows that between 2016 and 2022—a period of intense US-Colombian cooperation—potential cocaine production in Colombia rose from 1,053 to 1,738 metric tons, while seizures and forced eradication also increased simultaneously. More eradication, more production. More cooperation, more cocaine.

Ecuador: A Dramatic Example

No contemporary case illustrates this more starkly than Ecuador, whose president Noboa stood prominently at Trump’s event in Miami. As the Addicted to Imperialism studies documents, Ecuador has been subjected to a process of foreign interference since at least 2017—producing marked deterioration of the social rule of law and a progressive militarization of public security across four structural axes: foreign interference, economic liberalization and external debt, institutional deterioration, and the the securitization of social problems.

Under Moreno (2017–2021), Ecuador restored US security ties suspended by Correa, rejoining Southern Command exercises. Under Lasso (2021–2023), a Memorandum of Understanding was signed, modelled explicitly on Plan Colombia, with a projected budget of $3.1 billion over seven years—repositioning Ecuador as the top recipient of US Foreign Military Financing in the region, with $310 million between 2022 and 2023, surpassing Colombia.

Under Noboa, after presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated during the 2023 campaign, General Laura Richardson of US Southern Command traveled personally to Ecuador to agree a ‘joint plan’ including the deployment of US military personnel with full immunity from Ecuadorian justice—the same conditions applied in Colombia, immediately dubbed a “Plan Ecuador”. The homicide rate reached 47 per 100,000 in 2023. Noboa’s Plan Fénix deployed armed forces in city streets, built mega-prisons modelled on Bukele, and sought a constitutional reform to permit foreign military installations—such as the base in the Galápagos. The militarization of public security has not resolved the crisis. It has deepened it, while subordinating Ecuador’s sovereignty to Washington’s hemispheric agenda.

Two Hundred Years After Panama: The Amphictyonic Compass

The militarized drug war framework does not protect populations from narco-trafficking. It protects political elites from democratic accountability and normalizes authoritarianism under the banner of security. Addicted to Imperialism documents that in 2008, 35 percent of Colombian senators and 13 percent of House representatives were under investigation for links to paramilitary groups that simultaneously ran drug trafficking operations. The “War on Drugs” did not dismantle these networks. It provided them with political cover.

This is not surprising when we recall the framework’s origins. Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor admitted decades later that the 1971 declaration of drugs as ‘public enemy number one’ had a different target:

“The Nixon White House, after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

On a regional scale, from Plan Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, the alleged combat against cartels has consistently served as a pretext for military spending, interventionism, and the displacement of populations from their territories. The most recent illustration is Venezuela: the abduction of its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, was framed as an anti-drug operation—but swiftly revealed as a mechanism for reinserting Venezuela into Washington’s oil economy.

In 1826, Simón Bolívar convened the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama with a vision of extraordinary clarity: a confederation of Latin American republics acting collectively, guaranteeing their independence, and negotiating with great powers from a position of sovereign equality. The Angry Tide is today’s antithesis of that spirit. At Miami, Trump declared: “we will not allow foreign hostile influence to establish itself in this hemisphere—including the Panama Canal”—while Panama’s president Mulino sat in the audience and listened in silence. It is Monroism at its most undisguised.

Latin America and the Caribbean—its movements, parties, and progressive governments—needs a renewed regional agenda of sovereignty and concrete cooperation, including institutions capable of coordinating a sovereign response to the drug economy. The price of a kilogram of cocaine rises from approximately $1,500 at the point of production in Colombia to $20,000 in the United States. The producers—the peasant farmers—capture less than 1 percent of the global cocaine market’s value. Meanwhile, over 70 percent of the weapons fuelling cartel violence in Mexico are manufactured in and flow from the United States. The drug war, in its hyper-militarized version, creates the institutional framework for precisely the kind of health concerns, corruption, and impunity it claims to be fighting.

The first quarter of this century offers proof that a different ambition produces results. Operación Milagro restored sight to over 3 million people. The ALBA literacy programs eradicated illiteracy in Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. Regional unity with a true purpose of reaffirming sovereignty and guaranteeing a dignified life for the population must not be abandoned for failed policies and publicity stunts.

---

This article was produced by Globetrotter.Email

Carlos Ron

Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra America office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a former Venezuelan diplomat

Blood “Democracies” Bomb Iran

By Khalid A. Afsar

March 17, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by L. Prang & Co, Boston/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

The US has again illegally bombed the Islamic Republic of Iran during negotiations. While agreeing to give up entirely its nuclear enrichment, making every concession to avoid war, Iran couldn’t prevent the bombing of over a hundred cities by US and Israel. The genocidal US-Israel alliance murdered Iran’s spiritual Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, killing his wife, daughter, grandchildren, and 40 Iranian officials during the holy month of Ramadan in a single strike by Israel with CIA’s help.

The deadly February 28 attack on Iran has received broad support from western governments for another war of annihilation in West Asia (the Middle East). Canada, Australia, New Zealand (settler-colonial supporters of Israel, like the US), along with most European allies (except for Spain), have either condemned Iran, or simply looked the other way. NATO chief during his visit to North Macedonia also endorsed the war, saying, Iran poses “an existential threat to Israel.”

As with most Israeli wars across West Asia, European and N. American leaders remain defiantly Zionist. The compelling reasons for wars in the region always point to Iran’s support for Palestine and opposition to US and Israel since 1979.

However, since 1776, a constitutional democracy founded by a slave-owning elite, the United States, has brought people across the region and the world unprovoked wars and genocide, expanding its territory and global military bases. Similarly, Israel since 1948 has brought destruction, ethnic cleansing, and genocide to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, with “Greater” Israel’s wars of expansion in an explicit colonial objective to rule over the Arab world as another European settler-colonial state. What do western democracies represent when they fund and enable wars and mass killings of civilians overseas, decade after decade, especially across West Asia, and North and East Africa?

Blood Democracies

Stained with the blood of non-Europeans, western democracies are blood democracies. The book, American Holocaust, outlines in detail the “glorious” voyages of Christopher Columbus (a fanatical, racist, greedy entrepreneur, and eerily similar to Donald J. Trump), who paved the way for centuries of genocide and bloodbath against non-Europeans. Germany, France, England, Belgium, and countless European powers, barely representing 7% of the world, spent centuries subjugating and bleeding the rest of humanity in the name of capitalism, only to emerge as so-called liberal democracies.

Blood democracies will continue to spill blood around the world, because the racist, fascist politics at home have empowered their ruling elite to continue the colonial racist subjugation of the global South into the 21^st century. The very existence of these blood democracies can and will mean only more death and destruction to come. If any type of government poses a threat to the world, it is these western blood democracies that owe their existence to spilling the blood of non-Europeans for gold, silver, oil, diamonds, precious minerals, land, and enslaved workers and taxpayers.

Blood Politics

The US has made war now for 25 years in the 21^st century against Arabs and Muslims, costing over $8 trillion and nearly five million lives. Iran and its handful of allies in the region have come nowhere close to the US-Israel deadly achievements, often facilitated by many American proxies and client-states in the region (Israel, Saudia Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Türkiye, and now Syria, which shows Al Qaeda’s historical connection to blood democracies).

Since its founding in 1776, the settler-colonial United States has made war for most of its glorious 250 years: genocides against natives to steal land and resources; enslavement and violence against black bodies; an unprovoked war of annexation with Mexico, grabbing land consisting of Utah, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California; wars with Spain; the forceful and deadly annexations of Puerto Rico and Hawaii, along with Guam and a number of island-nations in the Pacific; war and occupation of the Philippines; the pillaging and destruction of Haiti; and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki using nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. But it didn’t stop there.

Since WWII, the US war on Korea killed nearly 3 million Koreans; the Cold War spread across South and Central America toppling many socialist governments; war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, killing 3.1 million people in Vietnam alone; support for deadly anti-communist military regimes around the world, such as Indonesia that killed a million people, and hundreds of thousands in Latin America; the 1989 invasion of Panama to kidnap Noriega; recent attack and kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife; the 8-year proxy war against Iran in the 1980’s through our friend Saddam Hussein, extinguishing the lives of one million Iranians and over half a million Iraqis; war in 1991 against Iraq, then devastating sanctions killing half a million Iraqi children, accompanied by continued weekly bombings until the invasion of 2003, killing a million Iraqis (a carbon copy of sanctions-then-invasion in action currently targeting Iran); the invasion and 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, taking the lives of a million poor people; the wars in Somalia, Syria, Libya, N. Waziristan (Pakistan), and Yemen that killed about 400 thousand impoverished Yemenis; under Trump, the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani; proxy genocidal war against Palestinians through American funding and arming of Israel supported by all western governments; and the 12-day war against Iran in 2025.

After a western-backed CIA’s successful regime change operation in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected government, to facilitate the theft of Iranian oil by British Petroleum (BP) over 26 years, Zionist West has continued to seek regime change following the popular revolution of 1979. Western oil companies and governments, losing their strategic and lucrative control over Iranian oil, have remained locked in a forever war against Tehran. The late Robert Fisk in his magnum opus, The Great War for Civilization, shows US’s planning and initiation of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88): the US helped Saddam Hussein build chemical and biological weapons factories; Germany provided the chemicals for the weapons; and Saudia Arabia and Kuwait funded it to the tune of $250 million. The war killed over a million people in Iran.

Fisk also details the downing of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 by USS Vincennes, killing all 290 civilians, including 20 members of a family attending a wedding in the Gulf. Vice President George H. Bush defiantly said, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.” That longstanding jingoism of the US continues under a fascist Christian supremacist administration, which torpedoed an unarmed Iranian naval ship engaged in routine maritime exercises with other countries in the Indian ocean. In this context, one must understand why Iran’s enduring patience has run thin with blood democracies and their allies in the region.

Moreover, the attack on Iran and killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader has been called “historic” by the US. One finds nothing historic about another unprovoked deadly American war unleashed on Muslims fasting during the month of Ramadan. Israel and the US have done that repeatedly to Palestinians and the region over the last 25 years. Indeed, the war on Iran could be historic if the US hadn’t spent 250 years engaged in wars of expansion and domination. Only an absolute and habitual distortion of history would render the war on Iran as “historic.”

The history of American war-making, regime change, overthrow, and the assassination of political leaders and opponents has marked America’s glorious 250 years of history, which the settler-colonial blood democracy will proudly celebrate on July 4, 2026.

“Only [Blood] Democracy in the Middle East”

Since the founding of another blood democracy in 1948, Israel has followed in the footsteps of its great patron-saint, the US, who has since the assassination of JFK, armed and funded Israel, making it the most powerful military and only nuclear power in the region. Israel’s founding paralleled America’s post-Independence violence: the many wars of expansion and annexation, which began with the forced removal of 700,000 indigenous people in the land of Palestine, an undeniable resemblance to the Trail of Tears the American blood democracy let loose on the natives in N. America.

“Our friend, Israel,” has forced Palestinian off their land throughout its history, deploying armed Israeli settlers, backed by US and Europe. Israel has and continues to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians across Gaza, assassinating Palestinian leaders, massacring women, children, aid workers, refugees sheltering in tents, using highly explosive MK-84 bombs that evaporate bodies, all supported by western blood democracies.

Israel’s egregious violations of international law and human rights have never elicited condemnation, let alone intervention or sanctions, from western democracies. Israel bombed and assassinated the president of Yemen in 2025. It bombed and assassinated Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, preceded by 3,000 pager bombs let loose on civilians, which the UN condemned. It bombed and assassinated Iranian leaders in Iran which later started the 12-day war in June 2025. Israel and US have now bombed an elementary girls’ school in Iran, killing over 165 children – an enormous crime against humanity foreseen by the IDF killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza during the ongoing genocide.

The murderous Israeli operations that have carried out the 3-year-long ongoing genocide against Gaza and bombings and killings across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Qatar, have once again expanded to Iran, globalizing Zionist genocides aided and abetted by blood democracies. Iran will continue its resistance, as the anti-colonial struggle of the global South against blood democracies continues across Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and West Asia.

Our Last Hope

Blood democracies, riddled with divisive politics of mutual hate, racism, classism, elitism, and sexism, have given way to national borders, militarism, wars, poverty, climate catastrophes, and a deadly world marching swiftly toward a nuclear holocaust.

We Americans, living inside a blood democracy, have gained a clear understanding that the coterie of corporate elite (the Epstein class, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Meta, Oracle, Tesla, Amazon, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Trump Organization, etc.) will starve the people here at home and massacre people abroad, committing genocide and ecocide, as their corrupt rule lays waste to the world in search of endless profit and lucre. (How little things have changed since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.)

Our only hope lies in our humanity, that final refuge, that messiah, which unites us across nations and religions against war and mutual annihilation. A new internationalism, with many movements of people of conscience around the world resisting war, fascism, greed, and genocide will continue to fight back in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere (Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, et al.).

May this holy month of Ramadan bring peace and justice to the world.Email

Khalid A. Afsar

Khalid A. Afsar is a writer and educator.