The naked mole rat, the blobfish: the appearance of some animals is often ridiculed on social media. Fortunately, there are still biologists – who talk with respect about the species they study. Right?
Not in the case of the goblin shark, according to a recent newspaper article The Guardian: In it, Australian fish professor Culum Brown says the shark is “ridiculously terrifying” to look at. “Even his mother won’t like his face.”
So a Good Ugly Beast. Poor goblin shark. Admittedly, his nose is a bit long, and his teeth show a lot of gums, but that has a function: he uses that nose to sniff out his prey. And those jaws can shoot out impressively to grab unsuspecting victims, like dentures popping out with force. “Just like a horror movie,” says Brown.
All that commentary: it would make you camera shy as a shark. It is therefore not surprising that the seven-meter-long goblin shark has rarely been observed to date – the observed specimens were either already dead or were attached to a fishing line. And yet the shark has probably been swimming around for about 125 million years.
But now for the first time there have been observations in the deep sea. In the Journal of Fish Biology two goblin shark encounters are described: Australian scientists filmed the shark in 2024 at a depth of almost 2,000 meters in the Tonga Trench, during an expedition with the research vessel Dragon. And thousands of miles away, the species was also spotted by biologists from the University of Hawaii.
These individuals will never encounter each other, because, like other deep-sea animals, they have an extremely slow metabolism and therefore an extremely slow pace. Except for those lightning-fast jaws, that is.