Who would have thought back in 1698, as they downed their espressos, that the little band of stockbrokers from Jonathan’s Coffee House in Change Alley EC3 would be the founder- members of what would become the world’s mighty money capital?

Progress was not entirely smooth. The South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 and the coffee house exchanges burned down in 1748. As late as Big Bang in 1986, when bowler hats were finally hung up, you wouldn’t have bet the farm on London surpassing New York, Frankfurt, and Tokyo as Mammon’s international nexus. Yet the 325,000 souls who operate in the UK capital’s financial hub have now overtaken their New York rivals in the size of the funds managed (including offshore business); they hold 70% of the global secondary bond market and the City dominates foreign exchange trading. And its institutions paid out £9 billion in bonuses in December. The Square Mile has now spread both eastwards from EC3 to Canary Wharf and westwards into Mayfair, where many of the private-equity ‘locusts’ and their hedge-fund pals now hang out. For foreigners in finance, London is the place to be. It has no Sarbanes-Oxley and no euro to hold it back, yet the fact that it still flies so high is against the odds. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, transport systems groan and there’s an ever-present threat of terrorist attack. But, for the time being, the deals just keep on getting bigger.

Nurse sharks are nocturnal animals, spending the day in large inactive groups of up to 40 individuals. Hidden under submerged ledges or in crevices within the reef, the Nurse sharks seem to prefer specific resting sites and will return to them each day after the nights hunting. By night, the sharks are largely solitary. Nurse sharks spend most of their time foraging through the bottom sediments in search of food. Their diet consists primarily of crustaceans, molluscs, tunicates and other fish such as spiny lobsters, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, octopuses, squid, marine snails and bivalves and in particularly, stingrays.

Nurse sharks are thought to take advantage of dormant fish which would otherwise be too fast for the sharks to catch, although their small mouths limit the size of prey items, the sharks have large throat cavities which are used as a sort of bellows valve. In this way, Nurse sharks are able to suck in their prey. Nurse sharks are also known to graze algae and coral.  Nurse sharks have been observed resting on the bottom with their bodies supported on their fins, possibly providing a false shelter for crustaceans which they then ambush and eat.