Sunday 20 October 2019

Another Shark Bitten by Something Bigger

A second shark has been found which has been bitten by a larger creature. This only months after one was found before dead and bitten in half, see link above. The beast was not dead and was retrieved by a ship on a mission to tag sharks in the North Atlantic Ocean. The young male Great White shark is twelve feet long and weighs 1,164 pounds, about half a ton. It has been fitted with an electronic tag when caught off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada and has since swum over six hundred miles to the ocean near Maryland USA. It was nicknamed "Vimy". Vimy had clearly been in an altercation with other sharks and he has some old healed wounds on his body that have left scars; and sharks do fight amongst themselves sometimes. However there was another more recent laceration that has caused concern. The founding chairman of the "Ocearch" tagging organization with the appropriate name of Chris Fischer, said:  "It was clear that something had just grabbed his entire head... It was a very large animal that grabbed it, something significantly bigger than twelve feet. Anything that can grab an animal like that by the head is pretty impressive." Source: https://www.foxnews.com/science/great-white-shark-us-coast-attacked-photo. Impressive and scary! It once more raises the question about whether there are monsters living deep in the ocean that are far bigger than any known species of creature. Scientists know less about the depths of the earth's oceans than they do about some of the planets of outer space. It was once suspected that the deep sea was the marine equivalent of a desert or ice cap, inhospitable with only very basic life. But research since then has proven otherwise. A lot of it has been arrived at inadvertently from exploring the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The ocean liner which sank in 1912 was a huge steel construction. It was previously assumed it would be preserved perfectly in the cold quiet Atlantic abyss as if in an aquatic time capsule. However, the broken ship was in very poor condition when it was discovered in 1985. It was being consumed by anaerobic microbes; while fish, crustaceans and molluscs of all varieties had infested the hull until it resembled an artificial coral reef. It will probably be completely consumed within the next century, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0RDHfXMqTY. Such an unexpectedly rich ecology will no doubt generate some unexpectedly dramatic organisms. Maybe some of the sailors' legends of sea monsters are true. Deep sea explorers should take precautions.

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