It doesn’t take a master shrimper to pick out which of his red-bodied catches is not like the others. However, Georgia trawler Carl Moore’s first appraisal of a rare goblin shark proved a keener eye than most.
Midway through an April fishing trip off Key West, Moore’s team onto his boat鈥攆loundering but alive. Moore remarked that the deep-sea shark, allegedly 15 feet long and named for a mythical Japanese demon, looked “prehistoric.”听And in a way, he was right.听
off the coast of Japan, the goblin shark is the only living member of the family Mitsukurinidae, which dates back 125 million years. Scientists know how long goblin sharks live, how quickly they grow, and , but better understanding deep-sea fauna (in this case, between 900 and 4,500 feet below sea level) has been a task.
Though rarely seen by humans, and mostly near Japan, goblin sharks fall under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’听听list, as听.
Thanks to some quick photography work from Moore, however, shark expert and colleagues are pooling new knowledge into a paper about these elusive creatures. Moore, who’s been shrimping in the Gulf for half a century, only recently started photographing his finds; he wants to show his three-year-old grandson what goes into the shrimping process.
Apart from the photo and first-person accounts, Moore doesn’t have proof of the catch of his career鈥攊t’s his practice to throw back anything still breathing.