Fishermen in Japan where in for a nasty surprise when they caught a frightful-looking 5-meter-long (16.4-foot-long) megamouth shark in their fishing nets.
This exceedingly rare creature was caught off the coast of central Japan, around 5 kilometers (approximately 3 miles) from the Owase Port in Mie Prefecture.
The 1-ton megamouth shark was eventually bought by a local Japanese fishmonger.
Featured with an enormous head and rubbery lips, the perfectly named shark swims with its "megamouth" wide open, filtering the waters to catch plankton, jellyfish, krill and shrimp, among other seafood.
The megamouth shark was first discovered in 1976 off the coast of Hawaii, after which only 60 sightings of the rare sea creature had been confirmed.
These sharks swim at a depth of around 120-160 meters (394-525 feet) during the day, but at night they rise up higher to feed, and swim about in a mere 12-25 meters (39-82 feet) of water.
The megamouth shark is an extremely rare species of the deepwater shark and is usually found near Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan. As humongous as it is, it is still the smallest of the three plankton-eating sharks besides the whale shark and basking shark.
In 2014, another megamouth shark was caught in Japan. More than 1,500 people out of sheer curiosity and intrigue gathered to watch scientists perform a public autopsy on the rare creature at the Marine Science Museum in Shizuoka City.
The following year, a 15-foot-long megamouth was found dead by the residents of Marigondon in Pio Duran in the Philippines. Nonie Enolva of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources-Regional Emergency Stranding Response Team said that the shark's death had not been determined.
Enolva noted that the shark's tail was missing and that it had wounds on its body, and said that the shark may have died by getting ensnared in a fishing net or consuming some poisonous organisms underwater.
