More than 1,600 feet below the ocean’s surface, in the near-freezing waters off the coast of Antarctica, an enormous fish cruised into a camera’s purview for mere seconds.
“What is that, that sneaks in, in the background?” a scientist on board the research ship at the surface, Prof. Heather Stewart, asks in disbelief, in a video clip of the moment. Then, her jaw drops.
It was a sleeper shark, about 10 to 13 feet long, caught on camera in Antarctic waters possibly for the first time.
The sighting was a “huge surprise,” Alan Jamieson, the director of the University of Western Australia’s deep sea research center, which set up the camera, said on Wednesday. “We didn’t think any sharks were in Antarctica.”
The purpose of the early 2025 expedition was to document the biodiversity and the habitats of the South Shetland Trough in Antarctica, Dr. Jamieson said. The sighting, he added, showed that the geographical range of sharks is most likely far greater than researchers had previously thought.
The Minderoo-U.W.A. Deep-Sea Research Center, which maps the deepest areas of the ocean, first posted a video of the shark on Instagram early last year, but it did not draw wide attention until the Australian Broadcasting Corporation covered the finding this month. The shark was caught on film at a depth of 490 meters (about 1,600 feet) in 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) waters.
Martin Collins, a marine ecologist and Britain’s scientific representative to the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the body responsible for governing the Southern Ocean, said the finding was exciting because of how few images there were of sleeper sharks that far south. “They probably are around in these areas,” he said of sleeper sharks, “it’s just that people haven’t put cameras in the right places in the past.”
Dr. Collins, who also works for the British Antarctic Survey, Britain’s polar research institute, said that he had filmed a sleeper shark nearly three decades ago in similarly cold and deep waters, just off the Falkland Islands. These days, better cameras and technology have expanded the capacity of deep-sea research, he added.
Sleeper sharks are relatively slow-moving and not particularly active, but they can cover long distances as they scavenge for food.
Arve Lynghammar, an associate professor at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science in Tromso, whose research focuses on Arctic fish, said that while scientists know little about the species of sleeper shark spotted in Antarctica, more is known about the Greenland sleeper shark, among the largest fish native to Arctic waters. The Greenland species has a life span of more than 272 years, according to a 2016 article in Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Sleeper sharks have body fluids with a similar freezing point as seawater, allowing them to traverse very cold water as they search for food, Dr. Lynghammar said.
While this may be the farthest south a sleeper shark has been seen, it would be premature to draw conclusions about whether the sighting has anything to do with climate change, said Lydia Koehler, a policy researcher focused on sharks at the University of Plymouth.
“They might have been there all along, and we just didn’t know,” she said. Still, she added that the finding was important for establishing which species exist in Antarctic waters. This is critical for establishing guidelines for protecting them from deep water fishing and trawlers, she said.
“It’s another step in understanding these important, very valuable deep-sea ecosystems that need protection,” Dr. Koehler said.
Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news and other topics.
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