Sorry to revive a dead thread haha, but I was poking around the web looking for info on smooth hammerhead captivity and found this. Figured I could lend a bit of insight from the shark scientist and aquarist realms…
Hammerhead sharks are, according to basically every aquarist I’ve talked to, incredibly finicky. They’re very easy to stress out because they’re highly sensitive animals. That massive cephalofoil houses all of their electrosensory organs, and they have a wider spread of those given that shape, which means they experience a vast amount of sensory triggers constantly. This is not exactly conducive to aquarium life - life support systems generate electrical signals, as do the lighting, the various pieces of technology around the exhibit, and even peoples’ smartphones. Additionally, they’ve been known to be prone to illness, which could very well be due to the fact that they stress so easily and their immune systems thus are correspondingly weakened. A friend of mine did her master’s thesis on elasmobranch captive stress, and I recall she said that in her experience they’re some of the most easily harmed species in that regard. My experience with studying the aquariums that hold or have held them has been similar; basically every facility I’ve been to that’s among that number has some form of, for lack of a better word, horror story regarding how they’ve been doing well one day and then passed away the next. Just looking at this very thread, Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium has now lost all their scalloped hammerheads, seemingly very suddenly over a short period in the last two years or so. Even Georgia Aquarium, one of the most successful facilities in the world at exhibiting great hammerheads, actually lost the species for around a half decade prior to the opening of Sharks: Predators of the Deep from what I gather (all of the original hammerheads in Ocean Voyager passed away). From what I can tell in America, only Monterey Bay Aquarium has had essentially no difficulty in managing scalloped hammerheads, as they’ve apparently had many of the same individuals for quite some time at least since the remodel of the Open Sea. They of course have an enormous and specialized pelagic tank, which may have relatively limited electrosensory interference given the sheer volume. Disney’s “The Seas with Nemo and Friends” at Epcot also has a scalloped hammerhead that’s been on exhibit for, it seems, over a decade, but that’s another truly massive tank that also seems to be very well maintained and monitored, and it is just a single shark so perhaps that individual is uniquely healthy and stress free.
What I can say for certain is that many aquarists I’ve spoken to really would prefer to avoid the species. They obviously really care about the animals they are stewarding, at least generally, and it’s of course brutal to lose one. Most I’ve spoken with simply do not want to take the chance of doing harm to such rare and beautiful animals any longer, unless they’re certain they can provide them the best possible home and care.
