Shark Dentistry by Lucy

Hello everyone! This is Lucy, it’s been awhile since I last posted but I am going to tell you about a story from a few days ago…

It all started with Sally saying “Hey guess what we found on the beach today?” 

“What?” I asked curiously, guessing it was some sort of animal. 

“Two shark heads!” was the answer, one that I  was definitely not expecting. As you can imagine there were alot of follow up questions. 

  We went to examine them closer the next day with an idea. A dentistry idea. We were going to try to get the teeth/jaws from it so we could have shark teeth. Heidi, Sally, and I packed a bucket with the things that we might need. Pliers, big serrated knife, scissors, water, shoes, and sunscreen. We were all excited to go, it was a new adventure, something that we hadn’t had in a while! Once we are all packed and ready to go we left on the dinghy to our friends we have been isolating with on the boats Arena and Utopia. We had a full dinghy that was full of laughter and lots of talking on the short but very windy and bumpy ride in. 

We unloaded on the beach and the rest showed me to the shark. When we got there I was so surprised. I was expecting a shark skeleton, but this seemed pretty fresh still and looked like the pictures of sharks heads you would see. 

The day before we figured out it was  a mako shark, one of the fastest sharks. We looked at it for a little bit then went to work. Sally and Heidi picked up the shark head- (their noses plugged) with two sticks and dumped it in the water to get out the bugs. (I should mention right now that rotting shark smell is DISGUSTING. We all agreed it is worse than fish or rotting fish. So very very unpleasant.) Once all the bugs were out, it was time for taking out the jaws. Sally and Riley successfully sawed through the extra head near the jaws.  

At one point near this time we saw a wiggly tooth, and Bronwyn came in with the pliers. “Don’t worry, I’m good at pulling out wiggly teeth, I got some practice.” She exclaimed smiling, she had been losing lots of teeth lately. We all started laughing and sure enough, the tooth came out easily. Sally, Bronwyn, and Riley ran off to get a glass jar to put it in. 

Heidi and I continued sawing then we gave the teeth and gums to Riley, Bronwyn, and Sally for them to extract the teeth and rinse them. Ada, Ava, Heidi, and I continued to try to get as much of the jaw out by sawing, holding it in place, and using the pliers. We were all very successful and after 30 minutes to an hour we had a glass jar full  of teeth. There was only one problem…They absolutely stunk. We all went back to our boat and put the teeth in muriatic acid and water. It bubbled up so much, but we added more water and it seemed to be working.  

We realized that it would take a while for it to work so we started playing some games. After playing the same games for a while you get more creative with your games. We played a game called “quack”, categories, and alibi. After lots of games and lots of laughing, everyone went back to their boats for the day.  

The next day once the teeth were all clean and bleached we all made necklaces out of them. 

 It was a fun, interesting, adventure and new thing to do. I would never ever think I would be doing “dentistry” on a shark, but it was surely an experience like no other that I have done!