T. Pratt's scientific contributions

... A 235-cm total length male nurse shark was tagged on 26 th June 2021 in the Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida, where nurse sharks aggregate and mate in the shallows every summer [21][22][23]. The animal was captured in shallow water using a large dip net, and restrained in the shallows for measurement, sampling, and tagging [14]. ...

... As a benthic shark species, they have a low metabolic rate [13] and are thought to be sedentary and ill-adapted for efficient swimming [11]. However, Pratt et al. [14], have reported individuals making annual migrations over 600-km roundtrip, suggesting that this species is a capable swimmer. As a generalist predator, the nurse shark diet contains both vertebrate and invertebrate prey, which are captured through suction feeding [15] that is presumed to occur mainly at night, with no reports of group foraging between individuals [11]. ...

... In Fig. 4, human IL-15 residues that interact withIL-15Rα (Chirifu et al. 2007) are shaded blue or pink, depending on whether they form part of the "patch 1" or "patch 2" part of the interface (Olsen et al. 2007), and equally colored are aligned residues that are identical to them (Asp and Glu were also accepted as "identical" to each other) Fig. 2 Cladogram of the phylogeny of various Elasmobranchii and representative animals of other animal clades. For the phylogeny and the indicated time-in million years ago (MYA)-estimated for some of the separation events, see the references (Broughton et al. 2013;Renz et al. 2013;Kashiwagia et al. 2016;da Cunha et al. 2017) Fig. 3 Conserved IL-2, IL-15, IL-15L, and IL-21 loci. Analysis of gene organization in cattle (Bos taurus) and thorny skate (Amblyraja radiata). ...

... If this is the case, then thermoregulation may be the proximate driver of females using the DTCMG in June and July, seeking the shallows after they have copulated at least once in deeper water. Nurse shark females appear to ovulate and encapsulate ova sequentially over 2 to 3 weeks [45] and are known to have multiple paternity within broods [67,68], so repeated mating events after the first insemination would be expected. ...

... Carrier and Pratt [41] documented the need and successful implementation of management and protection for the DTCMG, making it the only marine protected area designated specifically for a shark breeding ground. More recent work has used modern biologging technology to quantify nurse shark mating behavior [42] and acoustic telemetry to document their migrations [43]. ...