The year 2014 is not just the year of the Horse, as per the Chinese calendar. It turns out it is also an auspicious year for rare shark sightings.
After the goblin shark caught off Key West in the Gulf of Mexico, another extremely rare shark species was spotted in the coasts of Japan.
A13-foot megamouth female shark was hauled from the depths of 2,600 feet, making it the 55th megamouth to have been found since the first one in August 1988 in the waters of Hawaii.
While the goblins and megamouths are both deep-sea dwellers, megamouths are more often seen. Because of this, they are also more prone to getting killed either for consumption (such as what happened to the 40th megamouth caught in the Philippines five years ago) or for future studies. However, unlike the second goblin shark in the Gulf that was released, the recently-caught megamouth suffered an unlucky fate.
In a public viewing, the 680 kilogram megamouth was dissected by a team from the Marine Science Museum in Shizuoka City in front of over 1,500 Japanese who were allowed to witness the autopsy of the strange specimen. This is the 13th catch in Japan.
The megamouth or Megachasma pelagios is not called a megamouth for nothing. Similar to the whale shark and basking shark that are known planktivores, it is easily recognized by a very enormous mouth lined with small teeth and gills, which the shark uses to filter the waters for small shrimps, fish, and plankton.
Sometimes, it can be mistaken as an orca because of its broad and rounded snout and the brownish-black color on its top, but these sharks are bottom-dwellers of the oceans, swimming slowly near the continental shelves, only surfacing at night to feed.
Megamouths, with is flabby and soft body, are poor swimmers, and they can be attacked by more aggressive marine species in the area, such as what happened to the second specimen found by a group of scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Two sperm whales were "attacking" the shark.
George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, told National Geographic in an interview that "the area from Japan down through the Philippines and into Indonesia seems to be a hot spot" for megamouths.
He added that the west part of the Pacific, from northern Australia up to the Philippines, is "an absolute honey hole of diversity," echoing what some researchers have thought about the area: a cradle of marine mammal evolution.
