No fin compares to you

From elusive angelsharks to chunky, sprinting shortfin makos and glow-in-the-dark velvet belly lanterns, Helen Scales gets up close and personal with the sharks that swim in British waters

- Helen Scales

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.