Meet the Cookiecutter Shark, a Bizarre Predator With a Signature Circular Bite
Being able to find some of the most amazing sea animals sometimes means that we must go further than the surface of the water. For these researchers, they dove down deep into the Bermuda Triangle trenches to find some amazing discoveries, like the cookiecutter shark.
Cookiecutter Shark in the Bermuda Triangle
The next YouTube video posted at the bottom of this blog post takes us to the , located in the North Atlantic Ocean. This video was documented and shared by the National Geographic YouTube page.
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They are going to enter the Bermuda Triangle, which they share “is inhabited by all sorts of strange sharks, one of them is the cookiecutter shark, which lives in the Tongue of the Ocean.”
Cookiecutter Shark Sighting
©Jennifer Strotman / Public Domain –
The video starts by showing the depths of the Bermuda Triangle and the deep trenches contained there. The narrator comments, “We really have no idea what’s going on down in the deep trenches here. Anything could be happening in the deep sea. It’s one of the final frontiers for human exploration, even more interesting, in my opinion, than exploring space.”
Next, we see their divers going down to see what type of animals they will find. One of these divers is Joe Romeiro, who is an underwater cinematographer (who is a person who is in charge of photography and videography.) Underwater, we see a variety of sharks that make themselves at home in the Bermuda Triangle. We see sharks such as the and the sharpnose sevengill.
In addition to these, we see the . The narrators warn that although it has a sweet name, this shark is anything but sweet. They dive into how small this shark is and how bold it is when attacking animals much larger than they are. Let’s take a look below!
Cookiecutter Shark Facts
The cookiecutter shark is a small shark that reaches only between 14-22 inches long. We can see its mouth open if we pause the video at 2:31. And this brings us to the way it’s called the cookie-cutter shark. When it bites its victims, it is known to leave a cookie-cutter-type bite in its prey.
According to , “Cookiecutter sharks leave a very distinctive scar when they bite; their specialized jaw allows them to “scoop out a hemispherical plug of flesh from their prey,” according to the study. The sharks’ name comes from the uniformity of the bite, which looks “like you took a cookie cutter to some dough,” Papastamatiou said. “‘Ice-cream-scoop shark’ would be technically more accurate, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”
