Paul Clerkin, a shark ecology graduate student at California’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has been spending the last couple of months on a deep-sea trawling vessel in the Indian Ocean to see if the ship’s nets might pull up anything interesting in the way of sharks.

The trawler’s nets have been dropping to a depth of 6,500 feet off the coast of an island called Mauritius. What’s come up have been hundreds of strange-looking sharks. Several are species known to be very rare while others may be absolutely unseen before now.

“I tell people I have a ton of sharks, and they keep thinking I’m joking,” Clerkin said. “It was an actual ton. I brought back 350 sharks.”

What’s even cooler is that if any of the strange sharks are entirely new species? Clerkin gets to name them. He’s said that he’ll name a few after his mentors and possibly one after his mom and maybe himself.

We can hear his intro now…”I’m Paul Clerkin. You may not know me. A species of shark bears my name.”
Awesome.
[See a photo gallery of these weird sharks via OurAmazingPlanet.Com]
[MSNBC]

The world’s first hybrid shark was discovered off the coast of Australia containing both common and Australian black tip DNA, with up to 20% percent of the population sampled being hybrids. Scientist speculate that the hybridization increases the range that the sharks can survive and could be a result of changing sea temperatures.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.

“This is evolution in action.”

[Yahoo! News]

25 miles off shore, this big lug (let’s call him Alfie) decides to ominously circle this fishing tourists boat. You know, just for the lulz.

It should also be noted that this video was captured on an iPhone. Which could have lead to the greatest interaction with Siri ever.

Tourist: A Great White Shark is circling my boat, what do I do?

Siri: Let me think… Yeah, you’re screwed.

[KING 5]

Cyclops Shark! Sharks have moved into a new level of nightmare fuel!

Earlier this year fisher Enrique Lucero León legally caught a pregnant dusky shark near Cerralvo Island (see map) in the Gulf of California. When León cut open his catch, he found the odd-looking male embryo along with its nine normal siblings. “He said, That’s incredible—wow,” said biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña, of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico.

Sharks are being born with one eye and if it weren’t for this intrepid fisherman, he’d be creeping out the waters around California even as we type this sentence.

[Nat Geo]

Lots of odd creatures come from the sea, and add to the list a one-eyed bull shark fetus that was removed from the body of its captured mother recently off La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez.

A brief story about the shark is on the Pisces Sportfishing blog. Pete Thomas Outdoors shared the top image with two shark experts in California and both were skeptical at first, suggesting it was some kind of hoax.

One of them jokingly identified the species as a “Cycloptomus” because of a single eye — if it is, in fact, an actual eye — located just above the mouth.

But Tracy Ehrenberg, general manager at Pisces Sportfishing, has been in touch with renowned shark expert Felipe Galvan, who has seen the shark and has even produced a paper on the discovery.

[Pete Thomas Outdoors]

A great white shark tour operator in Australia has made a startling discovery. Sharks love AC/DC. They love them so much, playing their songs is a more effective method of luring sharks than spreading chum in the water. After all, they may not always be hungry but there is always time to RAWK!

“We know the AC/DC music works best by trial and error, and we are doing more research to see what works best with different species of shark,” says Waller.

Apparently, sharks are attracted by songs in the low frequency range, and two AC/DC songs in particular are best at working the great whites into a frenzy — namely the tunes You Shook Me All Night Long and, fittingly, If You Want Blood. Waller, whose business allows tourists to get up close and personal with the ocean predators in shark cages, says the music even gets the sharks head-banging, in a way.

This leaves only two possibly evolutions for sharks to become even more metal: 1) be made out of fire 2) wield a battle axe.

[Treehugger]

When Humphrey Simmons went fishing recently he didn’t expect to catch a shark, and he definitely didn’t expect the the shark to burp up the remains of a human being. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

When Simmons caught the shark a friend who was with him shot the shark several times. What happened next was shocking:

“We tied the rope around his tail fin, and pulled him towards the boat. We were going to cut the hook out of his mouth and let him go when he regurgitated a human foot — intact from the knee down.”

The body has been identified as a missing sailor. Play the slideshow below for several pictures of the grizzly sight (WARNING: Not for the squeamish!):

[The Tribune]

In which I add a wholly unnecessary narrative spin to the satisfying, straight-forward conclusion of a classic film.

Today: “Jaws”

After the shark explodes, the movie cuts to an establishing shot of a giant, glass skyscraper with a big sign on it that says, “Science, Inc.” Cut to a small room filled with video monitors where a balding man in a lab coat and a busty brunette in a pantsuit are rewinding footage of Sheriff Brody and Hooper on the Orca. The woman slams a coffee cup down on the table and says, “Ugh. That hick sheriff interfered!” “What should we do?” asks the man. “We have no choice. Initiate a new test sequence,” responds the woman, who then mutters, “the general’s gonna tear me a new one.” The man nods and

leaves the room.

The camera follows the bald man down a hallway lined with extensive piping and an array of glass-fronted incubation tubes, each of which contains a Quint. The Quints in each successive grouping of tubes are younger than those in the previous grouping. Finally, the man reaches a series of tubes filled with babies. He walks through a bright red door labeled, “Top Secret.”

Title card: “One week later.” Cut to a small beach located just off a narrow road. A black jeep suddenly turns off the road and drives onto the secluded beach. The tires grind along the sand before slowly crunching to halt. Two men wearing suits and sunglasses step out onto the tide-kissed shore and help a middle-aged Quint out of the vehicle. One of the men consults his watch and then nods to the other. Suddenly, in the background, a Black Hawk helicopter screams across the sky over the ocean and drops a giant shark into the water. Quint turns his head and watches the beast’s enormous, flailing body splash down into the cold, briny deep. Cut to a close up of Quint’s determined stare as he looks out over the Atlantic. There’s the click of a radio channel opening and a man’s voice says, “Test sequence initiated.” Credits roll.