![]() It became clear that this tiny animal was wounding some of the ocean’s mightiest residents. He also noticed that their mobile tongues and large lips allow them to form a vacuum on a smooth surface. In 1971, Everet Jones discovered small conical plugs of flesh in the stomachs of these sharks. By contrast, other sharks replace their teeth one at a time. The first breakthrough came in 1963, when a man called Donald Strasburg noticed that the cookie-cutter shark would shed its saw-like lower teeth as a single unit. People wondered if they were caused by other predators, parasitic lice, lampreys with their round toothy suckers, or even bacterial infections. everythingįrench naturalists discovered the cookie-cutter in the early 19th century, but no one connected this bizarre creature to the weird craters found on large fish until the 1970s. The fact that the youngster had two might mean that the cookie-cutter launched an unsuccessful strike, leaving the crescent-shaped wound, before finally getting a proper mouthful. None of these other individuals had similar wounds. Divers off Guadalupe Island have amassed the largest catalogue of white shark photos, and many individuals have been seen year after year. If this actually happened, it was probably a rare event. Maybe it tried to make a meal of the cookie-cutter and became a meal instead. But the luring hypothesis could explain why the great white was bitten near its mouth, rather than some less dangerous body part like a tail or underside. This is all speculation – no one has ever seen a cookie-cutter attack. The predator comes in for a closer look, and the cookie-cutter attacks. That is, except for the dark collar, which resembles the silhouette of a fish. The glow matches moonlight and starlight beaming down from above, rendering the sharks invisible to any predators looking up from below. Some scientists have suggested that they use this light to turn themselves into bait. Their entire undersides give off a vivid, green light, except for a dark collar around their throats. But they rise to the surface at night, and one of them may have encountered our poor shark during such an excursion.Ĭookie-cutters glow. Cookie-cutters spend the daytime at depths of up to 3,500 metres, where no great whites venture. ![]() Papastamatiou cautions that we can’t be sure of what happened, but here are some plausible guesses. ![]() (These chunks are conical, so the cookie-cutter metaphor isn’t quite right “Ice cream scoop shark” or “watermelon baller shark” are more accurate, if less catchy.) Shark want cookie ![]() These are serious injuries-the biggest craters ever recorded were 5 centimetres wide and 7 centimetres deep. With twisting motions, it scoops out a chunk of flesh, leaving behind circular craters exactly like those that del Villar saw on the great white. When the cookie-cutter finds a victim, it latches on with its large fleshy lips and bites down with its saw blade. “I dont know of any other animal that leaves a bite like that.” Instead, Papastamatiou thinks that they were the bite-marks of another shark, just a sixth of the size-a cookie-cutter. “A wound from a hook should leave more of a hole and would not be as smooth,” he says. Del Villar took photos of the animal and sent them to a team of scientists, including Yannis Papastamatiou from the Florida Museum of Natural History. Both were just behind the corner of the young male’s fearsome mouth. The other was a round crater, still open and bloody. On 25 August 2010, one of these divers, Gerardo del Villar, saw a great white shark off Guadalupe Island with two odd wounds on its head. Operators chum the waters to lure in the sharks, while divers enter in floating steel cages. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įvery year, between August and December, great white sharks arrive at the western coast of Mexico, and people jump into the ocean to see them. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |