An ungainly barrel of a shark cruising languidly over a barren seabed far too deep for the sun’s rays to illuminate was an unexpected sight.
Many experts had thought sharks did not exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica before this sleeper shark lumbered warily and briefly into the spotlight of a video camera, researcher Alan Jamieson said this week.
The shark, filmed in January last year, was a substantial specimen with an estimated length of 3m to 4m.
Photo: Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, Inkfish, Kelpie Geoscience via AP
“We went down there not expecting to see sharks, because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t get sharks in Antarctica,” Jamieson said.
“And it’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks,” he added.
The camera operated by the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, which investigates life in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, was positioned off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. That is well inside the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is defined as below the 60° south latitude line.
The center yesterday gave The Associated Press permission to publish the images.
The shark was 490m deep where the water temperature was a near-freezing 1.27°C.
A skate appears in frame motionless on the seabed and seemingly unperturbed by the passing shark. The skate, a shark relative that looks like a stingray, was no surprise as scientists already knew their range extended that far south.
Jamieson, who is the founding director of the University of Western Australia-based research center, said he could find no record of another shark found in the Antarctic Ocean.
Peter Kyne, a Charles Darwin University conservation biologist independent of the research center, agreed that a shark had never before been recorded so far south.
Climate change and warming oceans could potentially be driving sharks to the southern hemisphere’s colder waters, but there was limited data on range changes near Antarctica because of the region’s remoteness, Kyne said.
The slow-moving sleeper sharks could have long been in Antarctica without anyone noticing, he said.
“This is great. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place and they got this great footage,” Kyne said. “It’s quite significant.”
The sleeper shark population in the Antarctic Ocean was likely sparse and difficult for humans to detect, Jamieson said.
The photographed shark was maintaining a depth of about 500m along a seabed that sloped into much deeper water.
It maintained that depth because that was the warmest layer of several water layers stacked upon each other to the surface, he said.
The Antarctic Ocean is heavily layered, or stratified, to a depth of about 1,000m because of conflicting properties including colder, denser water from below not readily mixing with fresh water running off melting ice from above.
Jamieson expects that other antarctic sharks live at the same depth, feeding on the carcasses of whales, giant squids and other marine creatures that die and sink to the bottom.
There are few research cameras positioned at that specific depth in antarctic waters. Those that are can only operate during the southern hemisphere summer months, from December through February.
“The other 75 percent of the year, no one’s looking at all, and so this is why, I think, we occasionally come across these surprises,” Jamieson said.
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