Skipjack is a 23-year-old SciComm artist who promotes marine animal conservation. And they want you to forget what you think you know about goblin sharks.
“The internet lied to you,” Skipjack in a recent TikTok video, as he pointed to a picture of a goblin shark with grotesquely distended jaws. “Goblin sharks don’t look like this. At least — not 99% of the time.”
“Most of the time, they look like this,” Skipjack continued — sharing multiple photos of goblin sharks with a retracted mouth. “Just a normal shark with a big ol’ nose.”
“Honestly,” Skipjack admitted, “they’re pretty cute.”
Goblin sharks are a rare species of deep-sea shark that can be found globally around the world. Although information about them is limited, the main threat to goblin sharks is deep-sea longlining and trawling, when they get swept up as bycatch for commercial fishing.
According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, there’s no records of goblin sharks ever harming humans. They largely keep to themselves, slowly swimming from the open surface to at least as deep as 4,265 feet.
So what’s with all those unflattering pictures of goblin sharks that float around the internet, with captions like “pure nightmare fuel,” and “alien of the deep?”
Skipjack says it all comes down to the goblin shark’s “extendable jaws.”
“They slingshot out of their head when they attack,” Skipjack explained. “They can do this because shark jaws aren’t actually directly attached to their skull.”
This “anatomical quirk” is seen in a lot of shark species, but Skipjack says that goblin sharks display this on a much more dramatic scale.
“Despite this being so weird, it’s actually an adaptation of their environment,” he said. “Goblin sharks are deep-sea fish, and in the deep sea, food is scarce and animals need to conserve energy.”
Goblin sharks typically grow 12 feet long, but they weigh up to 460 pounds, which makes them sluggish predators.
“So instead of wasting energy moving that big, slow body around to try to catch prey, they just move their mouths instead,” Skipjack said, showing footage of a goblin shark thrusting its jaws forward three inches to swallow a fish whole.
So why do goblin sharks have such an “ugly” reputation?
Unfortunately, Skipjack explained, most of the goblin shark pictures that go viral online are images taken of them when they’re dead.
“It’s kind of a blobfish situation where the deceased fish — often photographed on the decks of deep-sea fishing boats or at markets — don’t always resemble the fish in life,” Skipjack said.
Skipjack was referring to a viral moment in which National Geographic scientist Richard Arnott set the record straight on the real appearance of the blobfish, defending the animal from “a vast bullying campaign.”
Goblin sharks — like blobfish — are just misunderstood.
“I think just by nature of how these elusive sharks are photographed and seen, we all kinda got the wrong idea of how they really look,” Skipjack said.
Header image via Dimitris Siskopoulos (CC BY 2.0)
