Megamouth Shark

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The Megamouth Shark is a big, ugly and extremely rare deep sea shark. Say goodbye to the deadly, streamlined, elegance of so many surface dwelling kin, welcome instead a chunky, flabby, massively mouthed monstrosity that appears to have been carved from flabby stone by a flabby sculptor who just stopped before putting any of the detail in. I couldn't blame him too much though, this thing reaches 5.5 metres (18 ft) in length with reported weights up to 1,215 kilograms (2,680 lb). Maybe he should have started on something smaller?

Image by 7-how-7 via Flickr

Megamouths are about as slow and clumsy a swimmer as they look, but swim they must. They spend their days at depths of as much as 1,000 metres (3,280 ft) before rising by night to 150 metres (500 ft) or less as they follow plankton. This plankton is captured by gill rakers, which are finger like projections on the gills, and is why they have such a gigantic, indeed mega, mouths. Yet this shark doesn't rely purely on a great, big cavernous gob, and certainly not on it's numerous but tiny teeth. Far better are the host of photophores that light up just above the mouth. Jellyfish and tiny crustaceans are attracted to these stars in the night sky, but then they fall into the black hole beneath.

The first megamouth shark was discovered in 1976. By now, there are about 50 specimens and they seem to live in tropical and subtropical oceans across the world. Not a great deal is known about them, but one of the stand-out questions is this: why did it take so long for us to discover such a huge, sluggish beast as this?

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