A large plain gray shark of 2.8 to 3 m (9 to 10 ft) with a long broad snout, conspicuous flaps of skin over the nostrils, tall triangular upper teeth and a ridge of skin running between the two dorsal fins. Nothing about it is decorative, and it is one of the hardest requiem sharks to identify from a photograph.
It lives deeper than divers go. The usual range is 90 to 430 m (300 to 1,400 ft) along the edge of the shelf, where it hunts near the bottom for fish, small sharks and squid, and it moves up into shallower water only at night. Records from recreational depths are rare enough to be worth reporting.
The nasal flaps are a clue to how it works. Sharks smell in stereo, comparing the time a scent arrives at one nostril against the other, and the flaps channel water through the nasal sacs as the animal swims. In a species that hunts in near darkness along the bottom, that channeling is doing more work than eyesight.
The reproductive arithmetic is the usual one for a deep, slow shark: ten months of gestation, a handful of pups, and late maturity. It is caught as longline bycatch throughout its range and used entirely, and populations have declined where anyone has looked. Listed as Near Threatened.
How to recognise it
long broad snout with conspicuous flaps of skin at the nostrils
This shark is occasionally taken as bycatch in bottom trawl nets, but more often it is retained in deepwater pelagic longline fisheries (Anderson and Stevens 1996). This includes tuna longline fisheries that are widespread across multiple management jurisdictions. In European waters this species is reportedly taken as bycatch in deepwater longline fisheries (Coelho et al. 2012), although no data on catch rates or landings are available. In the Mediterranean Sea it is taken as bycatch in the pelagic longline fishery operating from eastern Algerian ports (Hemida et al. 2002, Fowler et al. 2005).
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
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