#elasmobranchs

[worrywyrms]

gentle giant

[marinebioblr]

Flight of the mini-mantas! These little devils are mobulas, which are cousins of the more famous manta ray. They are known to migrate together in enormous schools of hundreds or even tens of thousands of individuals (especially off of Baja California Sur), and have no spines like a stingray. As such they are completely harmless, and beautiful to watch underwater.

[quillusquillus]

I searched goblin shark to see if they looked different than I remembered and they don't. Am I getting untrustworthy results trying to find regular alive shark or do people draw them more fucked up than I can imagine?

they're usually drawn based on this specimen:

or sometimes this one if you're nasty:

both of these are super duper dead!

Alive goblin sharks are white in colour and don't have their jaws popped out, which is something they CAN do but not something they do all the time. Here are some examples of live ones! They do still look freaky, but they don't look like an explosively decompressed corpse:

they're kind of just normal sharks!

(images from various sightings, gifs and end still from this video of a (very briefly) captured specimen at the Tokyo Sea Life Park https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNRAgfLTE1U)

[plethod0ntidae]

It is once again shark week, my dudes

I'm going to try what I did last year again, so it's time for a new shark with shark facts for every day of Shark Week! Best week of the year :)

Today, it's LEMON SHARKS!

(Negaprion brevirostris)

Lemon sharks are really cool because they're recently learning a lot more about their social behavior! We don't often hear about sharks as social animals, but in the case of lemon sharks, group behavior is very common. Lemon sharks actively *prefer* to be social rather than being alone, see THIS cool behavioral experiment by Guttridge et. al. for more information. They often aggregate in groups based on being a similar size to the other sharks they choose to hang out with!

Baby lemon sharks are frequently found in nurseries in mangrove forests, the tall prop roots of mangrove trees provide shelter and protection for the shark pups as they learn how to, well, be a shark! These animals also return to the same nursery grounds year after year to reproduce, a behavior called natal philopatry! Many animals do this, these sharks are only one example.

[unofficial-sean]

[chilirasbora]

Atlantic torpedo | Torpedo nobiliana

X

[rattyexplores]

Stingray feeding pits (ignore the holes in the centre, that's from GPS equipment).

The stingrays would come to Leeke's Estuary at high tide to feed. To hunt any sediment-dwelling organisms, the stingrays would dig into the sand, displacing a large amount of sediment in the process. This left large distinct holes across the estuary's sediment.

This impacts the ecosystem in a few interesting ways, such as the recolonization of pits by various organisms (VanBlaricom 1982).

More information:

VanBlaricom GR 1982 ‘Experimental Analyses of Structural Regulation in a Marine Sand Community Exposed to Oceanic Swell’ Ecological monographs vol. 52 no. 3 pp. 295-302.

O’shea OR, Thums, M, Keulen, MV, Meekan, M 2012, ‘Bioturbation by stingrays at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia’, Marine and freshwater research, vol. 63, no. 3, p. 195.

12/09/23 - Myliobatiformes sp.

QLD:CQC, Woppa (Great Keppel Island), Leeke's Estuary, coastal mangrove forest

[tenvaka]

can someone who knows a lot about sharks PLEASE explain the difference between order carchariniformes and order lamniformes. they seem so fucking similar to me and idk how to tell them apart