Mystery as almost 100 baby sharks wash up dead in Alabama bay

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Residents and holidaymakers in Alabama's Mobile Bay woke up to a grisly sight Saturday when they found an estimated 100 dead baby bull sharks lying on one of its beaches. The carnivores' corpses were scattered up and down the beach on Belleair Boulevard, near Dauphin Island Parkway, some alone, some clumped together - and around 40 tangled up in a net. Vacationer Sabrina Rios, whose family found the net, told WKRG: 'It definitely caught our attention because I know that that is illegal and you shouldn’t be doing that. We just didn’t know what to do about it.'

The Marine Resources Division and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab are heading up the investigation. But Dailymail.com understands that authorities believe tracking down the culprit will be like 'finding a needle in a haystack.' 'From what we could see, somebody had set a recreational gill net on the beach and the sharks were just swimming into the net and got tangled,' Chris Blankenship, director of Marine Resources, told Fox 10.

That's a curtain-like net which is all-but invisible to fish when underwater; they swim through the net head-first, and get their gills caught in the mesh - hence the name. Gill nets are commonly used in fishing operations and are legal in Alabama - but they can only be used with a license, and are supposed to be monitored when in the water. 'There were no markings on this piece of gill net that was there on the beach, so it's difficult to say whether the person that put it out had a license and if they were netting legally or not,' said Blankenship.

Rios said that the sharks' bodies were all around two-to-three feet long. 'It seems like such a waste,' she added. 'I mean whatever was in the net, it seems like they took it, and then they left the poor sharks there to die.' 'The smell was overwhelming,' Rios’ husband, Stoney Adkins, told Fox 10. 'So our two older boys took the shovel over and tried to dig holes and bury them.' They were joined in their efforts by others from the area, WKRG reported.

But authorities took 57 of the bodies for examination, and when Fox 10 went to the beach on Sunday they found three more sharks, as well as catfish and other sea life, still in the remains of the net. It's not known exactly how many sharks were originally left on the beach, but WKRG estimated that there were 'close to 100'.A shark specialist is due to examine the bodies on Tuesday to confirm the cause of death. Authorities say that the 57 bodies they took were just a small fraction of the number that live in Mobile Bay, and that the area will be more closely patrolled in the future.