THE words baby shark may have you humming a maddeningly catchy tune for the rest of the day, but they transport me to a Devon beach and an up-close encounter with the most adorable shark I’ve ever seen. A small-spotted catshark, it was swimming lazily around a rock pool. Roughly the size of a cigar, it was covered in speckles and it must have only just hatched out of its egg case, where it had been wriggling and growing for close to a year. I couldn’t resist picking up the little shark for a moment and gently holding it in the palm of my hand.
Britain is not renowned for its sharks, yet, beneath the waves, there’s a rich mix of species. The tiny catshark I found is one of 21 kinds known to reside full time in UK seas. An additional 40 or so arrive each year as seasonal visitors. Together, they range from deep-sea oddballs and plankton-sifting giants to superfast sprinters and flattened seabed sitters.
All of them are members of the same group of fish, known as elasmobranchs, the direct ancestors of which have been swimming around the ocean for at least 400 million years. It’s generally easy to spot a shark from a bunch of other fish. They have a characteristic bendy skeleton and jaws that are made not from hard bone, but cartilage—the same soft material from which human noses and ears are made. Sharks don’t have scales either, but skin covered in tiny teeth-like structures, called denticles, which makes them smooth if you stroke them from head to tail and rough like sandpaper in the other direction.
By the skin of their teeth: in folklore and culture
この記事は Country Life UK の August 16, 2023 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Country Life UK の August 16, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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