and you thought fish were fun!
well the kids that named this deep water glow in the dark shark thought it was fun, the combination of dark skin and photophores that produce a
subdued glow give this shark the ability to sneak up on prey and avoid predators at the same time, its taxonomic name is Etmopterus benchleyi, named in honour of Peter Benchley,
the author of Jaws, Vicky Vásquez and her team at the Pacific Shark Research Center in California first described the shark, for its informal name she then turned to some of her cousins who were 8 or so years old looking for a name for it, this from the article,
this super stealth, combined with the animal’s sleek, black
appearance led the kids to suggest naming it the “Super Ninja Shark.” Vásquez
says she didn’t think her colleagues would quite go for that, so she got them to
scale the name back a little, “We don’t know a lot about lanternsharks, they
don’t get much recognition compared to a great white,” says Vásquez, who is a
graduate student at the Pacific Shark Research Center (PSRC) in California. “So
when it came to this shark I wanted to give it an interesting story.”
so the shark is now called the
ninja lanternshark, the good news is that it only grows to about 18 inches long
and stays below 800 meters, so no chance of bumping into this one in the surf, you can download the original research paper at the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment