Cuteous buttoneous, take two. Photo: Michael H. Doosey/Tulane University via AP
Back in 1972, researchers found a shark off the coast of Chile. It was tiny: under 10 inches, and, in scientific terms, cute as a button. Or Cutieous buttoneous, to scientists.
Sharks can be very scary. They are, after all, perfectly evolved for killing. And while that doesn’t mean that we should kill them, it does mean that we should watch out for them. Because although they’re perfectly evolved, they don’t have the wherewithal to realize that we humans, with our thumbs and our big brains, have evolved to scare easily… and our reaction is usually to just kill the scary thing.
While great whites and makos and bullsharks and other scary looking sharks are getting the shit end of the stick because they could kill us when we’re dangling our legs in their living room, there is one shark that has nothing to worry about. It’s the called the pocket shark, and it is the complete opposite of Jaws.
Known to scientists (and people that speak Latin because it shows how smart they are) as the Mollisquama parini, the first time the species was discovered was only 36 years ago. Found at just over 1000 feet deep off the coast of northern Chile, the pocket shark wasn’t named a pocket shark because it’s the size of a hotdog. At the top of its pectoral fin, it has a small pocket. Presumably, it’s used to hide weed and shark porn from its mother as a teen-shark. Since that first discovery, it hasn’t been seen again–until now… and we found out because we killed it by accident.
Not quite 6 inches long, the pocket shark is indeed a shark that could fit in your pocket. Photo: J. Wicker, NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC/Miami Laboratory
The second pocket shark was discovered while researchers were sifting through a pile of frozen fish taken for a study on the feeding habits of sperm whales five years ago. The mini-shark had mingled with a small school of fish somewhere off the coast of Louisiana, and within a half hour of being netted, it was flash frozen for study. It wasn’t until a few years later, when scientists got around to sifting through their frozen fish find, that they realized they’d pulled up a pocket shark–and of course, since they yanked it from the sea and froze it for three years, it was very dead.
According to The Washington Post, scientists are kind of freaking out about the discovery. They’ve only seen one other pocket shark, and that was back in 1972, so they have reason to be excited. Closely related to the cookie cutter shark, the pocket shark uses cookie-cutter-like teeth to “excise a nearly symmetrical oval flesh plug from a variety of prey species including marine mammals, tunas, billfishes, and squids.”
Researchers assume that the 5-inch pocket shark they found was very young–young enough to have a partially healed umbilical scar on its abdomen. According to Guinness, “the most likely record holder (for smallest shark) is the dwarf lantern shark (Etmopterus perryi), males of which measure a total length of 16-17.5 cm (6.3-6.8 in).” What’s interesting to researchers is the distance between the first shark discovered and the second–Chile is very far away from Louisiana.
Every now and then, something happens in the ocean that makes it obvious that there is a lot more down there than we think. And because we are humans, we usually find that out because we’ve killed something down there. High-five, us.
