ABC News (the Australian one, not the US one) is reporting on a rare catch.
"It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you're in that mouth, you're not coming out... I don't think you would want to show it to little children before they went to bed" said the fishermen skipper David Guillot who caught it. It "scared the living bejeezus out of all on board."
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) confirmed it to be a frilled shark, and while the species is known to the scientific community, it was a nonetheless rare and bizarre find for local fishermen.
This isn't a huge shark, just over 1.7 metres (6 1/2 feet) long. This particular specimen was caught at 700 metres deep;
even though this species has been found as deep as 1,500 metres, it generally lives in waters shallower than 1,200 metres. None of the fishermen had ever seen one of these before and it was able to twist its body, and strike like a snake when handled by fishermen after being brought on board the trawler.
Interview with the Skipper here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @05:20AM
Now the Japanese will start hunting them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday January 23 2015, @05:51AM
I clicked this clickbait this morning, which vaguely makes it sound like a new discovery. Related to your comment, it has been available in Japan for a very long time, with the first reports by westerners in the 1800s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilled_shark [wikipedia.org] (Lots of nice pictures of this shark too)
Anyway, this morning when I was feeling a little duped, I ended up following a link in the wiki cited above to a whole list of living fossils, which much more interesting than listening to some random fisherman describe catching a fish _he_ hadn't caught before (but has been caught a lot -- enough to show up in Asian fish markets from time to time): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday January 23 2015, @06:24AM
Well, at least I did learn that the Frilled Shark is aplacental viviparous; I seem to remember this coming up in an earlier discussion, perhaps about Cthulhu?
(Score: 3, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday January 23 2015, @10:47AM
"It has 300 teeth o'er 25 rows, so once ye be in that mouth, yer not comin' out... I don't think ye would want to show it to little children afore they went to bed" said the fishermen skipper David Guillot who caught it. It "scared the living bejeezus out of all on board."
Anyone else unable to read this in anything other than a pirate voice?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday January 23 2015, @03:42PM
Certainly improved the summary : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24 2015, @07:01AM
Challenge! Frilled shark cannot run on Windows, and has no open source drivers for Redhat, so that is a draw.