70 Awesome and Amazing Facts About Sharks | Amazing Facts 4U
- Sharks have been around (400 million years) for longer than trees (350 million years) and dinosaurs (200 million years).
- Sharks belong to a group of cartilaginous fishes. Rays and skates, which may have evolved from sharks, also belong to this group.
- Sharks can be found in all of Earth’s oceans.
- There are at least 400 species of sharks placed into eight groups. Only about 30 species are known to attack humans notable among them are the Great White, Tiger, Bull, Mako, and Hammerhead sharks.
- Most sharks are completely harmless and fewer than 20% of them are larger than adult humans.
- The smallest shark is the dwarf lantern shark, which is only seven inches long.
- The longest shark is the whale shark, which can grow to 50 feet weighing more than 18 Tons.
- Sharks amazingly don’t have a single bone in their bodies. All their skeleton is made up of cartilage.
- The amazing fact is that a shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water equivalent to it detecting a single drop of blood in a large swimming pool. It can sense blood from 4 Km away in the sea.
- Amazingly sharks are the only animals that never get sick. They have been found to be immune to every disease including cancer possibly due to the fact that they have cartilaginous structures and not bones.
- Basking sharks are pregnant for more than two years, while other sharks, such as the bonnethead shark, are pregnant for only a few months.
- A mother shark can give birth to up to 48 pups in one litter. The pups are usually born tail first. Whale sharks give birth to the greatest number of pups up to several hundred in a litter.
- Sand tiger sharks give birth to live young, but don’t have enough placenta or yolk to feed all of them. Amazingly the embryos of tiger sharks fight and eat one another until there are only two pups left, one on each side of the womb to be born. This form of cannibalism is called oophagy.
- During a dissection of a mother tiger shark, a scientist was examining a birth canal and was bitten by a tiger shark embryo. Amazingly this is the only recorded instance where someone was bitten by an unborn animal.
- Amazing fact is that when baby sharks are born, they swim away from their mothers right away and are on there own. In fact, their mothers might see them as prey.
- Hammerhead sharks’ heads are soft at birth so they won’t jam the mothers’ birth canals.
- Some female sharks have been found to give birth to an exact genetic clone of themselves without the need for a male . This is called parthenogenesis.
- While the ostrich lays the largest eggs on land, the whale shark lays the largest eggs in the sea. An egg from a whale shark measuring 14 inches in diameter was found in the Gulf of Mexico in 1953.
- Sharks lose more than 6000 teeth a year and amazingly teeth can be replaced within 24 hours. Sharks have 40-45 teeth, with up to seven rows of replacement teeth behind them. Some sharks lose over 30,000 teeth in a lifetime. Newer teeth are always larger, so sharks can look scarier as they age.
- A shark’s jaw is not attached to its cranium. Because its mouth is situated on the underside of its head, a shark can temporarily dislocate its jaw and jut it forward to take a bite.
- When sharks bite down, their eyes automatically close to avoid damage to their eyes in case their prey starts squirming.
- Some sharks can bite hard enough to cut through a thick piece of steel. They usually kill only when they are hungry, which isn’t very often. Some sharks can live a year without eating, living off the oil they store in their bodies.
- When a shark eats food that it can’t digest , it can uniquely vomit by thrusting its stomach out its mouth then pulling it back in.
- A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
- In fact sharks never stop moving, even when they sleep or rest.
- Hearing is probably the best of all of a shark’s senses. Some species can hear prey in the water from 3,000 feet away. They are better at detecting low frequency sounds, so they can’t detect the high-frequency sounds dolphins make. Sharks do not have ears on the outside of their body, but rather on the inside of their heads.
- When sharks are tipped upside down , their sensors are over stimulated and they enter tonic immobility becoming temporarily paralyzed. This is the way to control aggressive shark.
- Sharks must constantly swim in order to breathe. They need to be moving forward in order to force water through their ever moving mouths and over their gills.
- Unlike fish, sharks do not have a swim bladder to help them keep afloat. Instead sharks have a large oil filled liver. Sharks that spend a lot of time on the surface, such as whale and basking sharks, have massive livers.
- Shark liver oil used to be the main source of vitamin A for humans. The liver of a basking shark can weigh over 800 Kg and could be 25 % of body weight and contain 600 gallons of oil.
- Some sharks—such as the Great White, Porbeagle, and Mako—have crescent shaped tail fins and can swim very fast. The fastest shark the “Shortfin Mako,” has been clocked at 68 miles per hour.
- Amazingly both the Mako and the Great White it can also leap up to 30 feet high in the air.
- Whale sharks are the biggest sharks, yet completely harmless. They eat plankton. Reaching lengths of 40 feet, whale sharks are both the largest sharks and the largest fish in the sea.
- About 30 fatalities are reported due to sharks. Amazing fact is that for every human killed by a shark, humans kill three million sharks.
- More people are killed by bee stings and lightning than by shark attacks. A shark attack most often occurs when a shark mistakes a person for a seal or other animal.
- About two-thirds of shark attacks on humans have taken place in water less than six feet deep. Also most shark attacks occur less than 100 feet from the shore.
- Sharks will often give warning signs before they attack, by arching their backs, raising their heads, and pointing their pectoral fins down.
- A single species of shark , the Great White shark kills more humans than all the other shark species combined. The shipwreck survivors in the open ocean are at risk. It’s jaw is six times stronger than a wolf’s .
- The second-most dangerous shark in the world, the tiger shark, is sometimes called the “garbage can of the sea” because it will eat anything, including animal carcasses, tin cans, car tires, and other garbage.
- The frilled shark, or eel shark, is called a “living fossil” because it is so much like some extinct sharks that are found preserved in fossils that became extinct 350 million years ago.
- Portuguese sharks live at depths of 12,000 feet, which is over two miles deep.
- As long as a shark’s back is mostly under water, it can swim easily. A nine foot-long bull shark can swim in just two feet of water.
- Sharks amazingly cannot swim backwards.
- Sharks may use the Earth’s magnetic field with special organs that act as a compass to navigate the oceans.
- A female blue shark’s skin is three times thicker than a blue male’s to survive courtship bites.
- Amazingly the Cookiecutter (cigar or luminous) shark attaches its mouth onto its victim and carves out a chunk of flesh, leaving a distinctive circular wound in its prey. Uniquely it’s body has a series of holes called “photophores” that glow in the dark water.
- The wobbegong shark blends so well into the ocean floor that it is also called a “carpet shark”
- Nurse sharks are the laziest sharks, spending much of the day resting on the sandy sea floor, sometimes stacked on top of each other. When they get hungry, they are like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking prey off the sea floor or from between rocks.
- Sharks are killed because shark teeth are used to make necklaces; cartilage is used to make fertilizers; skin is used to make leather; liver is used to make face cream, sap, and fuel; and fins are used to make soup.
- Native Americans in Florida used the teeth of Great White sharks as arrowheads.
- A pair of shoes made of shark leather can last four times longer than shoes made with regular leather.
- The only purpose shark fin serves in shark fin soup is to provide texture. The entire flavour comes from the other ingredients. Yet hundreds of millions of sharks’ fins are cut off while the shark is still alive. Then, unable to swim and breathe , the sharks sink to the bottom of the ocean where they slowly die.
- There’s a little known species of shark in Greenland that eats polar bears and reindeer and can live up to 200 years.
- Many Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) have small parasites on their eyes that glow in dark water attracting prey into the sharks’ mouths. These sharks also have poisonous flesh that must be boiled three times before eating.
- Lamniformes, the mackerel sharks (Great Whites, Makos ) do not require sleep at all.
- Because Sharks have no ribcage, on land, its own weight can literally crush them.
- Hammer head sharks have a 360-degree vision in the vertical plane and they can see above and below them at all times.
- Great White Sharks congregate in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in an area known as the White Shark Café. The area described by researchers as the shark equivalent of a desert having very little food. The reasons for this behaviour have not yet been identified.
- A bull shark can live in both salt and fresh water by regulating salt and other substances in its blood. In Australia, after a flood several years ago, a handful of bull sharks were stranded in a lake on a golf course but these survived in fresh water and started breeding.
- Killer whales know that great white sharks need to move to breathe, and they hold them upside down in order to kill them.
- The world’s most unusual shark, the megamouth (Megachasma pelagios), wasn’t discovered until 1976. Its mouth can reach up to three feet across, while the body is about 16 feet long. Only 14 such animals have ever been seen.
- Amazingly human corneas are so similar to shark corneas that shark corneas have been used as replacement in human eye surgeries.
- There is a fishing community in Indonesia that has pet sharks.
- In 1935, in Sydney, Australia, a captive shark, vomited up another, different shark, which had a human arm in its belly and that arm was found useful to solve a murder.
- It is not clear why sharks seem to prefer to attack men. In fact, nearly 90% of shark attacks have happened to men.
- A man named Rodney Fox needed over 450 stitches after a Great White Shark punctured his diaphragm, ripped open his lung, broke half of his ribs and fully exposed his abdomen and his heart’s main artery. He survived and started a foundation for the study and conservation of Great White Sharks.
- A man in Florida wrestled a shark out of the water to retrieve his nephew’s arm that had been bitten off. Doctors were able to re-attach the arm.
- Even if you aren’t immediately killed from a shark bite, there is a probability of you dying from infections from the atypical bacteria that live in the shark’s mouth.
- Before sandpaper was invented, people used the rough skin of sharks, called shagreen, to smooth and polish wood. Japanese warriors wrapped the skin around the handles of their swords to keep the swords from slipping out of their hands.
- Dick Richards, the original director of the movie Jaws, was fired because he kept calling the shark a whale.
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