Two schools of thought exist regarding the origin of the aragonite needles which make up the milky patches of water prominent on the Bahama Banks. One school views these so-called whitings as spontaneous precipitates [Cloud, 1962; Shinn et al., 1989; Robbins et al., 1997> and the other views them as stirred up bottom sediment [Broecker and Takahashi, 1966; Morse et al., 1984>. In the paragraphs which follow we summarize what we consider to be iron-clad radiocarbon and chemical evidence that whitings are dominated by re-suspended sediment. We offer a new and highly speculative mechanism for this re-suspension. Black-tipped sharks which inhabit whitings purposefully stir up the sediment in order to create a trap for fish, much as spiders construct webs as traps for insect prey. ¿ 2000 American Geophysical Union