Fishermen have reportedly spotted an extremely rare breed of shark 30 miles off the San Diego Coast. In recently released video, a pair of megamouth sharks were caught on camera. Val Costescu, David Stabile, and Andrew Chang captured the video of the rare fish swimming near their boat. “We didn’t really process the rarity of the situation until later on,” Costescu told local media.
There’s a reason the sharks are so rarely seen. “They spend the majority of their time in deep water far from the shore,” said Dovi Kacev, a researcher with Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “There’s still a lot of unknowns about them as far as where they spend their time because we see them so infrequently.”
The megamouth is a filter-feeding shark like the whale and basking sharks, meaning it swims with its mouth open filtering for jellyfish and plankton. Very few of the species have been see since the megamouth’s discovery in 1976 (fewer than 100, apparently). Researchers are reportedly meeting with the men who spotted the sharks to try and learn more.
