Re: Great White Shark hunting techniques -Reply -Reply

[Dennis C Hwang <dchwang@itsa.ucsf.EDU>]

On Wed, 24 Jan 1996, Nicholas R. Longrich wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, Scott Horton wrote:
> 
> > >On sharks:  Most whales that live in similar environments as the great
> > >white are usually pretty big, reducing their chances of becoming a meal.
> >  
> > It should increase their chance of becoming a meal, though it decreases
> > their chance of perishing from it. The sharks could survive nibbling on the
> > whales like fleas nibbling on dogs, or like remoras on sharks.

I don't think remoras nibble on sharks, exactly; they hang around for 
scraps and probably pick off parasites.

>       World's smallest shark: the cookie-cutter shark, whose 
> semicircular jaws take hemisperical chunks of flesh from cetaceans and 
> porpoises. It's really tiny for a shark, I forget how small exactly.

The cookie-cutter shark, _Isistius brasiliensis_, gets to be about a foot 
long, which is comparable to a lot of the other squaliform sharks (cf. 
_Etmopterus_, _Deania_, _Aculeola_, etc.)  It's also famous for taking 
hemispherical chunks out of the neoprene shielding on the sonar domes of 
submarines. :)

I think the record for "world's smallest shark" still goes to the 
midwater dogfish, _Squaliolus laticaudus_, which reaches sexual maturity 
at something like 6-8 in.

Back to paleontology...:)

--Dennis
dchwang@itsa.ucsf.edu
xenopathologist at large!