How to Relocate a Sandbar Shark

1. Every summer, members of a National Aquarium team take a boat out into the Delaware Bay. They use a chum basket to lure sharks to the boat and catch them with unbarbed hooks, which don’t hurt the animals.

2. Most of the sharks are tagged and released, but when the aquarium needs a new sandbar, the team hoists one onto a stretcher and puts it in a tank on the deck. Pumps circulate water from under the boat so it can breathe.

3. The boat docks at the University of Delaware Marine Science Campus in Lewes, where the team puts the shark onto another stretcher and rushes it to a holding tank.

4. For the three-hour drive to Baltimore, the team lifts the sandbar into a coffin-like “shark box.” Medical-grade oxygen is pumped into the water in the box, which circulates over the shark.

5. A 40-foot-diameter tank awaits at the aquarium’s Animal Care Center in Baltimore’s Fells Point, where the sandbar will stay for 90 days of medical tests and acclimation.

6. The sandbar is loaded into another shark box and driven one mile to the National Aquarium, where it rides an elevator to an acclimation pool behind the “Open Ocean” exhibit. Once settled, the shark swims through a latch door into the exhibit.