---
title: Mackerel sharks (Lamnidae)
scientific_name: Lamnidae
common_name: Mackerel sharks
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:28:58.650Z
tags: Mackerel sharks, Lamnidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/mackerel-sharks
---

# Mackerel sharks (*Lamnidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Lamnidae
- **Body shape:** Torpedo - Streamlined and muscular, built for open-water speed - jacks, tunas, barracudas.
- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- large torpedo-shaped body, typically 2-4 meters long
- crescentic (lunate) tail fin
- pointed, conical snout
- strong lateral keel on caudal peduncle

A fish is the temperature of the water around it. These are not.

Swimming muscle burns fuel and makes heat, and in an ordinary fish that heat is gone within seconds. Blood carries it to the gills, and the entire job of a gill is to hold a thin membrane between blood and seawater. A mackerel shark intercepts the heat before it gets there. Between the muscle and the gills sits a dense mesh of fine arteries and veins packed hard against one another, so warm blood on its way out runs alongside cold blood coming back in and hands its heat sideways. The heat never reaches the gills. It is carried back into the muscle it came from, and the core of the animal, along with the stomach, the eyes and the brain, sits well above the temperature of the sea.

Warm muscle contracts and resets faster, and a warm eye and brain keep working at full speed when the shark drops into cold water after something. The bill for this is enormous. An endothermic shark has to eat like a mammal to stay lit, it cannot loiter, and it cannot stop swimming at all, since the same body that holds heat in has no way to breathe standing still.

What the family built on top of that is essentially a tuna. The red swimming muscle has moved in off the flanks to lie against the spine, the body itself barely bends, and thrust comes from a stiff crescent tail on a narrow keel. Tunas reached the same design from an entirely different starting point, for the same reason.

Five species make up the family worldwide, the white shark among them, and one of them is on the Red Sea list: the shortfin mako, the fastest shark anyone has measured. It belongs to the open ocean and is a rare thing to see from a reef. The white shark is not part of the fauna here.


## Species (1)

- [Shortfin Mako Shark (Isurus oxyrinchus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/mackerel-sharks/shortfin-mako-shark)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/mackerel-sharks)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*