\u201cI was seeing all of these really cool social behaviours \u2026 what appeared to be a form of a hierarchy,\u201d lead author Natasha Marosi told As It Happens host Nil K\u00f6ksal. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was obvious that some of them enjoyed being around each other, and some of them were quite possibly learning from each other or co-operating.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study, carried out on the Shark Marine Reserve in Fiji, was based on six years of data that included 473 dives and 8,192 minutes of underwater observations on 184 bull sharks, ranging in age from young to adult. <\/p>\n
Marosi \u2014 a PhD student in animal behaviour at the U.K.’s University of Exeter, and founder of the research and conservational organization Fiji Shark Lab \u2014 says the sharks were all fed together inside a protected area called a \u201cprovision site,\u201d which allowed scientists, like herself, to do the dives and study them.<\/p>\n
Those who swim together, stay together<\/p>\n
As part of their analysis, researchers studied the association patterns of the sharks, with “associations\u201d defined as sharks being within one body length of one another. <\/p>\n
Marosi says they found that the sharks liked to align their swims in synchronization\u00a0called \u201cparallel swims.” They also observed \u201clead-follow\u201d behaviour among the sharks \u201cwhere one shark is positioned in front of the other one and they follow in the same kind of synchronized movements.”<\/p>\n
Researchers found the apex predators were being choosy about who they were hanging out with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both males and females preferred to associate with female sharks, although males had more social connections with the females. They also found the sharks were more likely to interact with other individuals of similar sizes.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774297331_761_default.jpg\")
The study observed different social interactions between the bull sharks, including ‘parallel swimming’ and ‘lead-follow’ behaviour. (Natasha Marosi)<\/p>\n
Age matters, too. They found that adult sharks formed the core of the network, with more advanced sharks tending to be less social. <\/p>\n
That may be because older sharks don\u2019t have as much need as younger sharks do for socializing, says Toby Daly-Engel, director of the shark conservation lab at the Florida Institute of Technology. <\/p>\n
She says young adult sharks may hang out with other sharks to get information on where to feed or mate or other aspects necessary for survival. But older sharks already have all that experience \u2014 plus they\u2019re bigger, so there\u2019s no need to hang out in packs.\u00a0<\/p>\n