Shark Bites: Lost and Found

Welcome to Shark Week! This week we celebrate everything elasmobranch—those special cartilaginous fish—especially the toothy ones. Later in the week, we’ll focus on two special species—whale sharks and basking sharks—but today we’ll highlight some interesting shark finds.

Lost Sharks

Academy research associate Dave Ebert has a mission: to discover and understand more about all of the species of sharks and their relatives, skates and rays, so they can be protected. Even though sharks do have their own week, thanks to the Discovery Channel, these predators are often overlooked besides a handful of famous species. In fact, there are likely about 1,200 species and only a very small percentage of those get attention, conservation efforts, or even studied period. Ebert is trying to change that, traveling the world, spreading the word about sharks, their importance to the oceans, and finding the lost sharks.

Found Sharks: Megamouth and Ninja Lanternshark

We recently covered two of Ebert’s found sharks. One is the rare megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) that Ebert and his team found off the coast of Taiwan with a Discovery crew capturing the entire process (you can read more in our original post here). Ebert tagged the shark but no data were captured from the tag. In a recent email, he said he hopes to return to the area soon to perhaps tag another megamouth. “I am still very excited about the long-term prospects of this project.”

For another find last year, a brand-new species called the ninja lanternshark, or Etmopterus benchleyi (named for Jaws’ writer and shark conservationist Peter Benchley), Ebert and his colleague Vicky Vásquez didn’t need a bigger boat, or a boat at all, for their discovery. The shark was sitting on the shelf of museum collection waiting to be described. For more on this story, catch this short video.

Ebert recently started a crowd-funding project to find more lost sharks before it’s too late. For more information, click here.

Rare Pocket Shark Discovery

Another lost shark was captured as bycatch several years ago near the Gulf of Mexico. It also sat on the shelf for a few years before scientists realized it was the rare pocket shark (Mollisquama parini) and only the second specimen ever found! The shark is not named for its size—although one could fit into your pocket—but rather the distinctive pocket-like orifice behind its pectoral fin. Researchers are unsure what this is for, but hope to examine the two specimens further to understand more about these amazing little sharks. Like the cookiecutter and other Dalatiidae shark species, when hungry, pocket sharks remove an oval plug of flesh from their prey (various marine mammals, large fishes and squid). Ouch!

“This record of such an unusual and extremely rare fish is exciting, but it’s also an important reminder that we still have much to learn about the species that inhabit our oceans,” says Mark Grace of NOAA Fisheries, lead author of the publication on the pocket shark finding.

Image: FLMNH Ichtyology