A couple of years ago, the VGP Marine Kingdom, a walk-through public aquarium at Injambakkam, Chennai, retrieved a few banded bamboo sharks (Chiloscyllium punctatum) from a local fisherman. “They were caught while fishing, and we got four semi-adults, two males and two females, which we kept in our display exhibit,“ says S Arockia Cinnakan aka Kannan, the institution’s head curator.

Last year, these slender, oviparous carpet sharks, native to the Indo-West Pacific region, which includes the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Australia, and the Philippines, began breeding. “We ended up with 64-65 eggs and over 50 pups,” he says.

Earlier this month, on June 6, the aquarium released 25 of these captive-bred banded bamboo sharks into the sea, at an event attended by A Srinath, Minister for Fisheries, Government of Tamil Nadu. “The sharks we released were around nine months to one year old,” he says, adding that the aquarium continues to retain some of the younger sharks.

According to him, these bottom-dwelling sharks, which usually consume crustaceans and shrimp in the wild, were trained to hunt before they were released. “We used to feed them frozen food. But before releasing them, we introduced them to live food. Thus they learnt hunting behaviour,” he says.

This initiative, says Kannan, ties into the aquarium's larger purpose. “We have planned a lot of conservation stuff, and this is just the beginning,” he says, pointing out that pups were introduced into the ocean at a stage early enough for them to get acclimated to it. “If we keep them too long, they will get used to the captive environment, and it will be tricky to release it back.”

Like most other sharks, the greatest threats these banded bamboo sharks face are from overfishing, as they often end up becoming unintentional bycatch. “Fishing trawlers destroy their nests, homes and take their lives,” says Kannan, who plans to use the remaining pups to breed more and continue with this reintroduction programme. “We hope to get the numbers higher,” he says.

While this is the first experiment of its kind, the aquarium hopes to expand to other marine species over time, with one caveat. “We will not be planning for any non-native species breeding programme. Our focus is only on native species.”