Find a Fish
Goblin Shark Colouration
Dear Mark,
One thing struck me as odd right off the bat. The shark in the pictures is a brownish-red color. I had seen 2 drawings in which the shark was that color, but the pictures I have seen show the shark to be a pale grey with blue on the edges of the fins.
Perhaps you have seen the pictures of the pale shark. They were originally published in Uyeno, T., K. Nakamura & S. Mikami. On The Body Coloration and an Abnormal Specimen of the Goblin Shark. Bulletin of the Kanagawa Prefectoral Museum (Natural Science). 9:67-70. 1976. The pictures were reprinted in "Sharks in Question: The Smithsonian Answer Book" by Victor G. Springer and Joy P. Gold.
Anyway to make my long story short, do you have any idea as to which coloration is the "normal" coloration, or why they would differ?
Thank you very much
Chris Rinewalt
Head of the Japanese Goblin Shark.
You are quite correct, the fresh-caught Goblin Shark on the Australian Museum web page is a dark red-brown colour. Last and Stevens (1994) state that this species is "uniformly greyish to reddish brown". It appears that the "normal colouration" of this species is variable within this range.
The Australian fish on the web page may have been naturally a dark colour, however I suspect that some of the redness is bruising. This specimen was caught in a trawl net at 960m. The total time of the trawl was 2 hours. If the fish was caught as soon as the net reached the bottom, it would have been in the net for quite a while. This may have resulted in the shark being abraded by the net and any other material also caught in the net.
An interesting point to note is that many of the small white-grey coloured specimens collected in Japan are caught on longline and are not subjected to the damage caused by a trawl net.
Dr M. Miya of the Chiba Institute and Natural History Museum, Japan has been doing research on this species. Dr Miya kindly supplied the above images of a 1.45m long Goblin Shark which was caught at the mouth of Tokyo Bay at a depth of 300m.
Further Reading
- Last, P.R. & J.D. Stevens. 1994. Sharks and Rays of Australia. CSIRO. Pp. 513, Pl. 1-84.
- Springer, V.G. & J.P. Gold. 1989. Sharks in Question: The Smithsonian Answer Book. Smithsonian Institution. Pp. 187.
