Sorry I've been gone from here for so long. Here's a much overdue Friday Fish - hopefully this big scary shark will partly ameliorate your feelings of abandonment from this site.
Anyway, the Porbeagle, a member of the family Lamnidae, the same as everyone's favourite fish, the Great White (Carcharadon carcharias). I found no reports that Lamna nasus was responsible for an attack on a human swimmer, but as a big, top-predator kind of animal, it's certainly not beyond the possible. Apparently, this is one of the few species of sharks known to jump clear of the water.
Another picture, just because.Image credit 1 here.
Image credit 2 here.
5 comments:
They are rather small though aren't they? Perhaps their not as lethalish as their larger cousins?
I wonder if the fish Brummell chooses reflects his mood at the end of the week?
Those are some teeth even if they may be smallish...
I wouldn't really say Porbeagles are small. Fishbase says maximum size recorded was 3.5 meters long and 230 Kg (different individuals).
So, not as big as the Great White, certainly, but certainly big enough to kill a human in the water.
I wonder if the fish Brummell chooses reflects his mood at the end of the week?
A long time ago I generated a list of taxonomic families to work through for these Friday Fish updates. I used MS Excel's random number generator and Nelson's 2006 book (which I've mentioned before, I'm sure). The book lists each family with a number (total is something like 600), and I just ran off a list of 20 random selections.
I'm almost at the end of that list now, so I guess I'll have to get the book from the library again. It was sheer good luck that family Lamnidae (big scary sharks) came up at all. Sorry again for the long delay, this species should have appeared here sometime in August or September.
Small is relative. Dead is dead.
I think it would be much more interesting if your fish reflected your mood. Or maybe if your mood depended on the random number generator...
'Tis a wee bigger than I thought. I thought they were more in the 1.5m range.
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