Portuguese trawler nets 'prehistoric shark'

[n2doc]

Portuguese scientists have captured a "shark from the age of the dinosaurs" off the Algarve coast.

Researchers caught the rare frilled shark aboard a trawler, where they were working on a European Union project to "minimise unwanted catches in commercial fishing", Sic Noticias TV reports.

The scientists from the country's Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere dubbed the shark a "living fossil" because remains have been dated back 80 million years, making it one of very few species of such antiquity still around today.

The Institute said the male fish measured 1.5 metres (5ft) in length and was caught at a depth of 700 metres (2,300 ft) in waters off the resort of Portimao.

more

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-41928537

[samnsara]

1. this is kinda like killing bigfoot.. why did it die?

[SonofDonald]

2. I was a commercial trawl fisherman

We'd bring up deep water fish now and then, these don't have an air bladder which would kill it instantly after being brought up from depth ( cod, Pollock, etc ) but these will live for a while after being brought up.

They wouldn't look any different from normal but would be very lethargic and if still alive, I think it's either the water temp, salinity, oxygen content or pressure difference that kills them.

I'm talking about fish brought up from depth not the exact type, they would swim on the surface, didn't try to descend and die short after.

I quit fishing because of the massive waste I saw in the pollock fisheries in Alaska, it was almost criminal what was being done, but the North Pacific Fisheries council set the quotas, and their board was stocked with industry fishery personnel.

Fox in the henhouse big time.

[Bluepinky]

3. Thats sad that so many unwanted fish and animals died.

I don’t blame you for quitting the industry, it sounds awful.

[SonofDonald]

4. I had to, it was obvious we were destroying the sea floor

With bottom trawls, they are right on the bottom catching everything in their way, all the fish/ sea life that wasn't the targeted specie were killed when brought to the surface then thrown back overboard, so much waste from what I saw, multiply that by dozens if not more times ( the amount of vessels fishing ) and it's just sad.

A crab boat catches crab, sometimes a few cod enter the pot but that's it, a bottom trawl is like clear cutting a forest, everything's gone.

In. 1987 we were delivering 100 metric tons per day to the factory processor, that's 2205 us pounds per ton, within a year it was getting harder to find fish, this is when the fishery didn't really have anywhere near the effort to catch it as in the next few years, it exploded from maybe ten factory trawlers to dozens.

We delivered 100 metric tons per day in about 6-8 hours of the net in the water, 13 years later I saw a show about the fishery that had a trawler haul up about 15 tons.

You would have thought it was a banner day for them, decimated means one in ten, what was done to the biomass after 1987was 7 to 8 in ten, I saw it coming and although I did kill massive amounts of fish for a living I couldn't live with it anymore.

They cleaned out the Bering Sea and vacuumed up the sea floor in less than ten years.

[Bluepinky]

5. So much waste and devastation.

I wish trawlers were illegal, what a horrible thing to do to our oceans and seas. There seems to be no limits to what people will do to make money, shark finning, mountain top removal, fracking, factory farming. At least you have a conscience and can see how wrong it was.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Dinosaur-Age Shark with 300 'Frilled' Teeth Caught in Deep Sea

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | November 13, 2017 02:28pm ET

Forget about the minuscule odds of spotting Ahab's white whale: Sightings of the frilled shark, a so-called "living fossil" that has elusively swum around Earth's deep waters since the age of the dinosaurs, may been an even rarer find.

Deep-sea fishermen recently spotted the snake-like shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus) in a pile of fish that unintentionally caught, known as bycatch, while they were fishing off the coast of Portugal. The shark died, but the fishermen handed it over to a research vessel, where scientists could study it, according to Boy Genius Report (BGR), a news site.

The examination gave scientists a close-up look at the shark's roughly 300 three-pointed teeth, which it uses to grab and kill prey, including fish, squid and other sharks. [In Photos: Seeing Sharks Up Close]

Margarida Castro, a fishery science researcher at the University of the Algarve, in Portugal, told Sic Noticias, a Portuguese news outlet, said that these strange teeth, arranged in a frill-like pattern, inspired the shark's name. The teeth look like backward needles, and its jaw can snatch prey more than half its size.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/60925-weird-shark-with-300-teeth-found.html?utm_source=notification




Yippee, Frilled Shark!

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