Sharp-tooth lemon sharks can be seen year-round around Dongsha Island. Dongsha Atoll National Park provides diverse marine habitats, including seagrass beds, coral reefs, and lagoons, offering ideal nursery grounds for lemon sharks and feeding grounds for other large cartilaginous fishes. The Marine National Park Headquarters has compiled recent survey results on lemon sharks into an educational booklet, allowing the public to experience the ecology of sharks—usually inaccessible in daily life—through soft, illustrated drawings.
Fish surveys around Dongsha Atoll have recorded a total of 708 species, including numerous reef fishes and large cartilaginous fishes, some of which, like rays and large migratory jack species, are rarely seen along Taiwan’s coast. The Marine National Park Headquarters notes that during certain tidal periods, lemon sharks can often be seen surfacing in the lagoons around Dongsha Island. This is related to the stable lagoon environment, dense seagrass growth, and abundant invertebrate resources, providing a stable food source for large fishes. Long-term tracking by teams from National Cheng Kung University and Aletheia University found that lemon sharks give birth in the lagoons of Dongsha Island every spring. Most recorded individuals are young, under three years old, and it is initially thought that lemon sharks move to deeper waters after reaching three years of age.
Dongsha Atoll is located at the northern end of the South China Sea and was designated in 2008 as Taiwan’s first marine national park. Its unique atoll topography and diverse marine environments make it a biodiversity hotspot in the northern South China Sea. Due to its remote location, survey teams have combined radio telemetry with field observations in recent years, continuously accumulating long-term monitoring data on large fish populations. These data provide essential reference for the management of Dongsha Atoll National Park. The related ecological findings have been published in an e-book titled Encountering Lemon Sharks: Dongsha Notes, available in the Multimedia Section of the park’s website.
Publication by Marine National Park Headquarters: <Encountering Lemon Sharks: Dongsha Notes>