Nurse Sharks: The Inspiration Behind This Year’s Ice Sculpture

We’re excited to continue the tradition of participating in the Boston Harbor Now Waterfront Ice Sculpture Stroll. The annual event, held on December 31 from 1:00–5:00 p.m., is free to the public and highlights the neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural institutions along Boston Harbor.

This year, we welcomed back sculptor Don Chapelle of Brilliant Ice Sculpture to capture a scene inspired by our Giant Ocean Tank and a species we care for and study: nurse sharks! Starting December 30, Don will be on Central Wharf working to bring his vision to life using nearly 50 blocks of ice weighing 13,880 pounds in total!

Read on to learn about the inspiration behind this year’s sculpture and see some of Don’s past Aquarium ice sculptures.

Nurse sharks at the Aquarium

Cirri, the nurse shark who calls our Giant Ocean Tank home, arrived at the Aquarium back in 2023. She’s the first nurse shark in the Aquarium’s care since 2012 and joined the Caribbean reef community of our exhibit after a quarantine period at our Animal Health Care Center in Quincy, MA.

During that time, our team started target-training Cirri, teaching her to associate feedings with a unique object—in Cirri’s case, an orange ball on a stick—to prepare her for her new routine in the Giant Ocean Tank. This training is a vital part of Cirri’s care, ensuring she receives the proper diet and nutrition, and over time will increase in complexity to encourage participation in her own healthcare.

Cirri recently celebrated her two-year anniversary with us. She can often be found “surfing” the tank currents but, if you don’t spot her swimming around, it could be that she’s hanging out near the bottom with Thomas, our green moray eel. As a benthic species, nurse sharks like Cirri enjoy resting on the sandy ocean floor or spending time tucked beneath the corals beside other nurse sharks. Our aquarists hypothesize that Cirri and Thomas’s apparent canoodling is inspired by this natural behavior!

Nurse shark research

Scientists in our Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life have been researching nurse sharks in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, for over 30 years. The Dry Tortugas are a remote island group located about 70 miles west of Key West and have been recognized as a shark mating ground for over 100 years. Little was known about shark mating behavior when Dr. Jeff Carrier (Albion College) and Wes Pratt (now an Adjunct Scientist in our Anderson Cabot Center) began studying this population in the early 1990s. Wes and his wife, Theo Pratt, continued this work through to the present day along with our Senior Scientist, Dr. Nick Whitney.

So, what have we learned over the past three decades? Quite a lot! The team’s research revealed that the Dry Tortugas are a vital habitat for nurse sharks, and that they return year after year to mate. By tagging and identifying the sharks, we’ve also learned that they can live into their 40s—much longer than previously thought. Over the years, we have also learned that boating and human activity disrupts the sharks’ courtship and mating in the shallows, and these observations have led to the site’s designation as a marine protected area—the only one in the world designated to protect a shark mating ground.

Past Aquarium ice sculptures

Each year, Don chooses a design that captures an iconic Aquarium animal that we care for, study, or protect—like this year’s nurse shark! Look back at ice sculptures of years’ past in the gallery below: