Current Event 2

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/06/bonnethead-shark-scientists-reveal-first-known-plant-eating-shark/1213376002/

Assessment of News Source

This article about new findings in the Bonnethead shark was found on USA Today. USA today is a very well know internationally sold magazine (and website) that is the flagship product of the Gannett Company which was founded in 1982 by Al Neuharth. USA Today is know to be impartial and is marketed more towards middle class Americans. The author of this particular article is Brett Molina, not much is known about Brett other than him being an online producer for USA today who generally writes about technology and science.

                                                Summary of Article
This article about the Bonnethead Shark describes how a scientist named Samantha Leigh who was a researcher from UC Irvine became interested in the Bonnethead shark and their documented weird phenomenon of ingesting sea grass. Samantha took it upon herself to conduct a scientific experiment in which she set about to prove whether Bonnethead sharks were eating and digesting the sea grass (meaning they would be considered omnivorous) or if they were simply ingesting the grasses while attempting to eat their normal fish prey. The results of the experiment stunned researchers as they in fact proved that the Bonnethead shar ingests and digests grass making it the first known species to shark to be omnivorous. Which just goes to show that there is still a lot that we do not know about this world.

                                                     Analysis

The goal of this article was to share an important and very interesting in my scientific information to the mainstream public.  This can be a very challenging thing to do as we just learned last week in class about rhetorical situation. Anything relating to science to experiments tends to be very heavy on math and very fancy jargon and lingo that makes it incredibly difficult for the average person to understand it. But if they can’t understand it, then they are much less likely to attempt to read other informative articles in the future. This article was very well written as it one hundred percent explains the experiment that was conducted fully, but also explains it in a way that kept it interesting, short, and in a language that everyone can understand.

                                                  Opinion 50

Although I understand why the Author chose to keep the article on the lighter side and did not go into greater detail about the finer aspects of the experiments findings, I do wish that he would have elaborated a little more about why these sharks may have developed the ability to digest grass. I believe that is a very interesting story all in itself.