Hello and welcome back Shark. Here is to another episode of
Deep dives with sharks. My name is Alex.
I am still the same weirdo that you've been listening to since
episode 1. Now we've got another shark for
you this week. It is another episode of regular
planned programming, but we will go back to movie analysis and
other things to talk about at some point down the road.
Don't you worry. Now I did want to find ways to
interact more with the shark. Here is and decided that if I
stream and play some fishy theme games that I can chat with you
all in between in episodes. That'd be a decent way to do it
so you guys can follow along on Twitch.
It's got the same name as the podcast, but there's just no
spaces. So it'd be deep dives with
sharks with capital letters for deep dives with sharks.
Just easy enough there. I don't really have a schedule
right now for streaming. I'm settling into work and such
so it'll smooth out. I'm trying to do at least once a
week, if not twice a week. I think I was aiming for like
Tuesdays and Saturdays maybe, but we'll see if that actually
pans out or if I change anything.
You can follow along on the Instagram for updates there.
I tend to mention when I'm going to go live and also what game
I'm going to be playing. So if you guys want to follow
along there, you are more than welcome to.
You can also send questions that way or over on the Instagram or
Twitter at Deep dives with sharks on Instagram and Twitter
at Deep Dive sharks. So the shark that we have for
this week is going to be the Angel shark.
Now to start off, the Angel shark is the only member of the
Squintinidae family. Other sharks like Makos, tigers,
and great whites share common families with other sharks, but
not the Angel shark. They're all alone by themselves
being cool little bottom dwellers, which is neat.
They tend to look and get confused for rays a lot.
They have a flat body with long pectoral fins that create a
diamond shape that we normally see with rays.
They do have a wider tail than rays though, as rays do tend to
have that really thin whip like tail.
The Angel shark tends to have a thicker shark like tail and it
also has two dorsal fins that are rather small, but they sit
on top right before the tail there, so they've got that as
well. They don't have any fins on
their underside, so where their belly is and their face is
rather blunt, adding to that ray appearance because of course
when you're looking at a cow nose ray, they have that really
blunt face there. Their eyes are small and located
on top of their head right before their 5 gill slits, so
that's really neat as well. They got those little eyes that
help to see especially for what how they hunt, which we'll talk
a bit little bit more about later.
These guys grow to be about 7 feet or 2.1 meters and weigh
about 77 lbs or 35 kilograms, which golly, that is a decent
sized shark. This actually did surprise me
since in pictures they look like they're about 3 feet long or
maybe about a meter. And I was playing an aquarium
game on the stream and threw probably five of these guys in
an aquarium that was way too small.
And I was shocked to find out how big they actually get.
And the game did kind of yell at me a little bit as they were
trying to grow and they could not.
But we got it figured out. They're all different tanks now
it works out, but a neat thing about these sharks is that they
can get deformities such as scoliosis, humpback curvature,
missing or additional fins, deformed snout, and others.
Which is neat that it can happen, but not neat to the
shark that it is happening to. It's actually rather
disappointing for them. These can occur due to a variety
of reasons, including nutritional imbalance,
parasites, genetics, traumatic injury, which I mean, yeah, that
one would kind of easily explain missing fins.
You know, you get hit by a boat, that might happen.
Also, stress can do this to them as well.
Not deformities can affect the shark in different ways, such as
mating, eating and swimming, although it may not have any
effect on them at all. So they could have scoliosis and
just be completely fine or that humpback arch and just kind of
go about their day. Other times, it makes it a lot
harder depending on how severe it is.
Now, the Angel shark has jaws that can snap upwards and pointy
teeth almost like needles to help catch their prey as they
are ambush predators, often burying themselves in the sand
to camouflage so that the prey swim right up to them before
they're snatched up to be a snack.
Now, this is kind of similar to what the Wobegong does.
As we talked about them before, the Wobegong tends to hang out
among coral reefs, and they'll stay perfectly still for hours
at a time. And when fish swim up thinking
that they're safe, they'll snatch them quickly.
But the difference is that the Angel shark is a bottom dweller,
so it will stay on the sandy floor, cover itself in sand, and
then when prey swims above it, it'll lunge upwards.
Kind of neat. Now these sharks tend to live in
shallower water, anywhere from three to 100 meters or 9.823.
Sorry, 328.1 feet. And they Austin live just off
the coast of Norway, Sweden, Morocco, and the Canary Islands.
Although their numbers have been declining due to overfishing.
So these numbers could sway as they are sometimes found in
Belize and Brazil as well, but it's not completely common.
Thankfully, many countries have aimed to help their numbers by
placing fishing bans and similar protections on other vulnerable
populations in the waters, which does also help the Angel shark.
Now, since 2010, the Angel shark has been critically endangered
due to bottom trawling in particular, which is a type of
fishing practice. Efforts are still continuing
around the world to protect the species, especially in Greece
and Turkey currently, which are countries I did not name
earlier. But like I said, the numbers do
tend to sway pretty much everywhere now they go.
Efforts go so far that there is currently a group known as the
Angel Shark Conservation Network that works with countries to get
set up different protective measures for Angel sharks in
particular. And sometimes that does involve
protecting the prey that they hunt and sometimes the predators
that would hunt them. It's a saves one part of the
ecosystem. You can save a lot of the
ecosystem as well. There are five different species
of Angel shark, including the Australian Angel shark, Pacific
Angel sharks, sand devil or the Atlantic like Angel shark,
Japanese Angel shark and the monkfish.
Now they vary in size and build, but they are all beautiful in
their own ways, which is really neat.
Beginning in 1977, these sharks were haunted initially to be
crab bait, which is kind of lame.
I mean, I am from Baltimore and we do love our Blue Crabs very
much, but I mean, you, you can use a catfish, you can use a
crawfish, you can use so many different things.
You can use a chicken neck. There's so many things you can
use besides a shark. But anyway, so they weren't
really haunted that often at first, but then there was a
commercial fisherman and there was one person in particular who
was named, but I'm not going to name them as I, they don't even
have like a Wikipedia page or anything like that.
So I didn't want to randomly throw some person under the bus
if I can't actually prove it, but whatever.
But they were the ones that helped to create a vast market
for these sharks, which then estimated killed about 90,000 of
the species, which is absolutely horrible.
In 1991, gill Nets were officially banned in California
to help protect many animals that fell victim to bycatch.
And in 2008 the UK granted Angel shark full protections.
So the neat thing is that these sharks are getting protected.
The bad news is that in some countries it is still really
hard to find them and really hard to protect them, but at
least there are some services that are looking to do that and
hopefully it will continue into the future.
That is what I have for the Angel Shark.
If there's anything that you guys would like to add or
anything that you want me to go talk about further, please send
it over to the Instagram or Twitter, or you can even ask it
and chat on the Twitch. And I will be more than happy to
add it to the correction corner in the next episode.
But going into shark safety this week, we have how to help an
injured or beached shark, which this information I got from
masslive.com. MASS as in Massachusetts.
I will say that when I tried Googling how to help an injured
shark, because many of you had asked about that before, Google
was like, yeah, of course you're trying to figure out how to help
someone that's been injured by a shark.
Yes, here's information on that. And I was like, no, no, no help
injured shark is is. Then when I tried breaking it
down, I tried searching so many different things and it kept
being like, here's how you make a tourniquet.
You need to control the bleed. And I'm like, no, this is not
for the shark. This is, this is for the human.
I'm like, how do we help a shark that's hurt?
And they're like, don't. I'm like, OK, great.
But I could not find too much. This is what I found on that.
I'm going to keep trying to look into that.
So we'll probably get more updates on that later.
But I do feel like I start many of my safety segments with, I've
talked about this before, but I definitely know I've mentioned
some tips about this and we're going to look a bit deeper into
it. I know previously I've mentioned
like where to push the shark from and try to do this versus
that. But this one, we're going to go
a little bit on a different route.
So the Masslive article got input from John Chisholm, who is
a shark expert that gave a talk at Shark Con, which is very
neat. He talked about tagging white
sharks up in New England as he works with the New England
Aquarium, which is really cool, and it was a really neat speech
to hear. So definitely recommend doing
that, either meeting him, listening to him, or something
like that. But when finding any beached
animal, your safety has to come first.
Many of these animals will weigh hundreds if not thousands of
pounds, which can be very hard to move.
I do cardio, but if I came up to a 600 LB great white, I'm not
going to be able to move that on my own.
As much as I like to think I'd be able to.
It's just not going to happen. If you have people around you
that are able to help, that could be give you a better
chance. But also if you can't move it,
please do not hurt yourself, throw out your back, anything
like that trying to move this animal.
It also does depend on where the animal is in relation to the
water. So if they're in a couple inches
of water, that typically will help to get them moving a little
bit more. But if they got caught in a tide
change, they accidentally beached themselves when it was
high tide and now it's low tide and they're good couple feet
from the water on sand. You're not going to move them a
whole lot because that Sam loves to give way and you're going to
be running. It's like when tires are in mud
or snow, they're just going to be spinning and you're not going
to be moving. So you want to be careful there.
Don't hurt yourself with that, especially if these animals are
very, very heavy. And of course, one thing to
check as well is if the animals even still alive.
Just because you find the beached animal doesn't mean it's
guaranteed that it's going to still be alive.
So one thing to do is kind of toss water on it, see if it
moves or if there's like any sort of motion with it.
Don't go kick it, poke it, stick your hand in its mouth, nothing
like that. That's just not the right move.
Just try to throw some water at it because usually that will
have some sort of reaction like, oh, yay, relief.
You also want to try to contact a lifeguard, local authorities,
local aquariums or animal rescues to come help the animal.
Now one thing to mention is we did just have hurricane Helene
come through and as a Marylander that was down here for this is
probably the closest storm that's come to me so far.
I don't know how y'all keep doing this.
This was wild for me. I was I was in a tropical storm
warning and still was like holy crap that's crazy and I looked
across the street and people were in my apartment complex
gym. So I, we lived, we're good.
But one thing that I did like was before the storm hit, there
was a lot of pages that were putting out different phone
numbers to contact if you find animals in places that they
shouldn't be. Because of course with all the
flooding, you're going to have animals that are over in the
Gulf that then discover they've got new territory unlocked.
Manatees especially are ones that love to try to explore new
areas, which is really cool, except for when that water goes
back down and now you've got that big rock just sitting in
the middle of the road. So instead of trying to roll a
manatee down the road or anything like that because that
might hurt it, there's different numbers you can contact. 1
specifically for the Tampa Bay area is going to be the
Clearwater Marine Aquarium. They are a rescue only aquarium
so all of their animals and they're either being
rehabilitated to be released again or they're unable to be
released and that is why they will stay there forever.
They have a nurse shark that was someone's pet at one point.
So they have a lot of cool things but they are they've
traveled really far before. I think I've seen them travel 4
hours up the coast at some point to help different animals.
So they're a really good resource to contact.
Definitely go with your local aquariums.
I know the Baltimore Aquarium has been one that has traveled
to Ocean City to help with different animal rescues, seal
releases, things like that. They've also helped many cold
stunned turtles. So there's lots of ways that
aquarium that may not even be too close to you or that you
think is that close to you will still be able to help even if
you call an aquarium that you know, and I'm not suggesting
that if you're in Tampa, you call the Baltimore aquarium
you've you've got 2 right near you Clearwater or Tampa, the
Florida Aquarium, sorry. So you can call them and even if
you don't know and say like you call the the aquarium over in
Fort Lauderdale, they'll still be able to get in contact with
the aquariums over here or they'll be able to give you
information to contact them yourself.
So that way you'll still be able to help them, which is really
cool because I do love that aquariums will work that way
instead of just being like, that's not our territory, get
away from me. So they'll do something like
that. But you shouldn't put yourself
near animal's head or mouth. You do also want to watch for
their tail as well, especially when it comes to sharks.
They have a lot of powerful muscles in their tail, which is
why great whites can breach so far out of the water.
Same issue with whale sharks is that they have all those
muscles, so getting smacked with it could hurt quite a bit.
So you want to be careful if you're trying to rescue them
because if the shark starts thrashing, that tail can hit you
and that can do some damage. The animals not going to
understand that you're there to help.
They just know that there's somewhere they haven't been
before and now some weird alien is touching them, which would
freak you out too if you're in that situation.
The animal has unfortunately passed at this point.
You still want to alert local authorities so that way they can
dispose the animal properly. Don't try to get rid of it
yourself or start chopping it up or anything like that.
You guys may have heard the story of Exploded Whale Beach.
I forget what state that was in. I believe it was in the New
England area. But there was a beach whale
many, many years ago and they did contact authorities.
But at the time, authorities sought to be really cool and
really funny to see if they can just dynamite explode this whale
back into the water. But the person that was in
charge of setting all that up didn't do it right.
So they announced that they were going to do it and got a crowd
of people to come watch and then proceeded to explode a whale and
the trunk slated on people. So it's it's if you have
dynamite, don't blow up a whale or a shark or a manatee or or
any I don't even know why you need TNT or anything like that.
Just don't do it. That's all I got to say about
that. But with this another thing to
consider is that if you try moving the animal on your own
you could injure the animal. So anyone who is crowd served
has found a random bruise on themselves that they didn't
realize they had as people push them across the crowd.
You don't want to unintentionally push against the
manatees liver and hurt them. That being said I also have no
idea what the anatomy of a manatee is.
Besides they look like a potato on the outside so I have no idea
of pushing their liver is even possible.
But I don't think that also rolling them down the hot
asphalt would be comfortable for them either.
So This is why you want to alert authorities.
In many areas, it's also illegal to touch wildlife for any
reason, which could get you into trouble.
So knowing if helping this animal is acceptable in your
area would be beneficial. Now some places will kind of
push that rule under the rug if you're trying to get an animal
back in the water. But I also know that others,
when people have posted videos of them, get an animal back in
the water, then still find the people for touching the animal
at all, which is crazy to me. But of course, they also don't
want people going out of their way trying to hurt themselves to
help an animal. So this is kind of priority
number one. So to recap, you want to keep
the animal in some kind of water if possible and try to get water
moving over their gills, unless they're an animal that breathes
air, such as a manatee. Then you just want to try to get
water on them so that way they don't dry out kind of neat.
But that there's what I have for the safety portion.
I will try to look more into it in case you find an injured
shark out in the water. See if I can find anything for
coming up future episodes. But we're going to go on to the
news. So we have two different stories
once again. The first one comes from New
Zealand and the title is New Zealand scientist.
Discover new spookfish living deep in the Pacific.
This is from NBC News. Now, this is conveniently in
time for Halloween. A little bit early, but we got a
new spooky shark. So the Australasian narrow nose
spookfish was discovered to inhabit waters of Australia and
New Zealand about 2600 meters deep to 8530 meters deep.
Now this is a species of ghost shark.
So it's a new species of ghost shark, which is so exciting.
I do love ghost sharks. They're also known as shamaras
and I have done an episode on them.
You can check that out as well. But not much is known about them
because they live so far into the depths and it's very hard to
get down to them. They do not know a lot about the
species lifespan, population size, or how they interact with
the ecosystem. But researchers are hoping to be
able to learn more about the species and the world around it
as we don't know a whole lot about the deep ocean as a whole,
which is why it took us so long to get here and find this new
shark. But researching this newly
discovered species will also help to learn more about the
ecosystem around it and also help to find ways to protect it
if it is endangered. Although currently they do not
have any sort of classification on it because they found a
couple species of it or a couple specimens, I should say.
And in this case, they're looking into more of it, hoping
to find out about the world around it.
And I mean, we recently found out about new types of octopi.
I was said octopuses. That's wrong, I think octopi
anyway, new species of octopi and also squid, as well as what
was the other one, jellyfish. There was a really neat video of
a jellyfish that researchers recently discovered in the deep
ocean. So they are getting down there
more frequently. Also with the new uncovering of
the Titan submersible, which that's a whole nother rant for a
different podcast, but anyway. But researching that too has
made it so that way they can look at some of the wildlife
around it. Recently, there's a video of
them pulling the wreckage out a bit and fish were swimming
around it like, oh, what you got here?
So they were able to kind of study the fish behavior as well,
which is neat. Now, I'm not saying go sink
another submarine of some kind to get a cool shot of fish.
But I mean, you know, fish like shipwrecks.
But the other story that we have is another new shark.
New shark species found but marks a tragic discovery.
And this is by Newsweek. SO2 new species in one week is
incredible and I for one feel completely spoiled.
We also have a new species of hammerhead shark, which is known
as the shovelbill shark as previously believed to be a
species of bonnet head. But DNA samples in 2017 show
genetic differences between the sharks that would classify them
as a different species. This process took time, as we
are only now just announcing that it is a new species, and
the researchers needed to work with local fishers to collect
tissue samples to have conclusive evidence.
Science is very fun but also demands a lot of respect.
The shove bill can be found from Belize to Brazil.
So right now, that's kind of the area that it's in currently
believed to be endangered despite just being found.
That's unfortunately the tragedy of it.
Now, because of uncapped fishing practices in Brazil, these
sharks can be caught and used for almost any purpose, such as
crab bait. Thankfully, the researchers are
currently working with Belize to create protections for this
shark and similar fish so that more species do not become
extinct. Which did bring up and really
interesting point in my brain. If we only just discovered this
shark and it's already endangered.
There has to have been many species that scientists hadn't
discovered that went extinct before they were found or could
be studied. Now.
Unfortunately, we won't really know unless we find fossil
evidence or we get a neat little stat sheet at the end of our
life of all the things that occurred while we were on Earth.
Which would be neat in my opinion, as I would love to know
how many breaths I took or how many wild sharks I was near, or
how many sharks fact I told in the lifetime.
Maybe for at least a couple billion, but you know, here we
are. This helps the numbers, but that
is what I have for this week's episode.
I want to thank you all for listening.
Thank you all for sharing. I do please ask you to keep
sharing, keep coming back. Follow along on the Instagram
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well at deep dives with sharks there too.
You can send in any comments, questions, anything of the sort.
You can also give this a rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever
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they Google this, finding how deep a shark can actually dive.
You get some facts. It's fun.
But of course I will see you guys in the next one.
Take care of yourselves, be kind to each other, and I'll see you
next time.