OCTOPUS’S GARDEN
Everyday life in the city of the cephalopods
SHARK RARITY
An ultra-rare frilled shark was recently spotted and captured off the Algarve coast in south Portugal by a trawler during research on minimising unwanted fishing catches. It has a body shaped like an eel and a head like a snake – though it could be seen as phallic. Samuel Garman, who was one of the first scientists to study this shark back in 1883, believed its snakelike qualities inspired legends of sea serpents. The creature, measuring 145cm (4ft 9in), is considered a ‘living fossil’ as it belongs to a species that dates back 80 million years, coinciding with the peak of the dinosaurs. Humans have come across it just a handful of times, including off the coast of the southeastern US in August 2004. The one spotted in Portuguese waters was captured at a depth of 700m (2,300ft) below the surface. Previous encounters have been around this depth, though not below 1,000m (3,300ft).
The frilled shark’s ocean habitat covers a wide area. It has been sighted off the coasts of Norway, Scotland and the Canary Islands; also in the Indian Ocean as well as waters off Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It was captured on film in Tokyo Bay in April 2017. Other than its habitat and appearance, there is little known about it, since it had never been captured before. It gets its name because of the frilly way its 300 teeth are arranged. The teeth’s ‘frilliness’, for lack of a better term, allows the shark to trap squid, fish and other sharks in its mouth when it lunges at them. Fox News, 13 Nov; D.Mirror, huffingtonpost.co.uk, 14 Nov 2017.
DOLPHIN NEWS
Uniquely, humpback dolphins along the Chinese coast have pink skin, but there are only about 60 of them left in waters around Hong Kong. The pink is from the blood vessels. The pinker they go, the more they are trying to cool down. Sun, 15 July 2017.
Humpback male dolphins appear to woo potential partners with gifts; they have been filmed presenting females with marine sponges. Researchers saw one diving down to dislodge a sponge fixed to the seafloor. He then balanced it on his beak and pushed it towards the female. But these gifts could also be used to intimidate females into mating – or so it seems: boisterous males have been seen to throw the large sponges at them. Sun on Sunday, 26 Nov 2017.
A four-year-old beluga whale was moved to live with bottlenose dolphins in the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea in 2013, but initially struggled to communicate with her new tank mates. However, within a few months, she had begun to copy their whistles and clicks. It could be the first example of an animal changing its vocalisations in an attempt to ‘talk’ to another species. “Two months after the beluga’s introduction into a new facility, we found that it began to imitate whistles of the dolphins, whereas one type of its own calls seemed to disappear,” said Elena Panaova, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. “While the imitations of dolphin whistles were regularly detected among the beluga’s vocalisations, we found only one case in which