Angler Joey Polk and his cousins, of "Team True Blue", landed the massive mako shark off Navarre Beach Fishing Pier.
The huge mako, which measured 10 feet and was a female.
More than 60 people helped to drag the animal from the pier’s end to the shore. After that the shark was was winched onto a truck and transported to Milton, where it was stored in an ice-filled cooler.
Normally, these fishermen tag and release the sharks they catch as part of an effort coordinated with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
Their decision to keep the mako was decided by researchers’ desire to study a large predator that was caught close to shore.
Scientists drove about ten hours overnight in order to harvest samples from the mako shark. They removed the animal’s backbone, the contents of its stomach and some of the shark’s organs.
