In August 2024, sports fishers off the coast of Costa Rica hauled up what looked like some kind of ungodly hybrid between a shark and a traffic cone. It was just a nurse shark, but it had creepy white eyes and, most notably, its skin was a bright orange.
The shark was caught near Tortuguero National Park at a depth of about 37 meters by a fisher named Juan Pablo. They did their due diligence: they measured it, snapped some pics, and then sent it back into the ocean.
The pictures later popped up on social media and made the rounds online, catching the attention of marine biologists who fired up their theory engines. They’ve been trying to figure out how and why a shark could turn the color of a slice of American cheese ever since.
Scientists Explain the Neon Orange Shark Found in Costa Rica
According to findings published in Marine Biodiversity, a research team led by Marioxis Macías-Cuyare of the Federal University of Rio Grande diagnosed the shark with an extremely rare condition called albino-xanthochromism. That’s a combination of albinism, a lack of dark pigmentation, and xanthism, too much yellow pigmentation.
The dead giveaway for this specific combo of conditions was the aforementioned skin and eyes. When it came to the eyes, they were white all the way down to the iris.
What the researchers found most remarkable isn’t just that it was orange but that the shark looked to be doing okay. It was around two meters long, meaning it was fully grown. That suggests it had survived at least a decade in the wild despite being so brightly colored as to render it the least stealthy shark in an ecosystem built on camouflage.
Albino-xanthochromism is rare and has mostly been documented in birds, with only a handful of cases in marine species recorded over decades. Nurse sharks have previously shown pigmentation issues before, but it’s never been quite like this, where it displays two different pigmentation conditions at the same time.
Why pigmentation issues happened at all is still a mystery, and there’s still the question of whether it’s a one-off fluke, which seems likely, or whether it’s a sign of environmental influence in the northern Caribbean.
There are many questions left to answer. And some that may never be answered. For now, all we know is that somewhere out near Costa Rica, a shark is sneaking up on prey despite looking like a giant basketball.
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