At the risk of instilling a fresh new Jaws-like fear of sharks in you, a team of researchers, publishing their findings in the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation, has discovered a new species of walking shark off the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea.
Thankfully, the Dudgeon’s walking shark, or Hemiscyllium dudgeonae, belongs to a group of sharks known as epaulet sharks, which are small, harmless predators that use their pectoral fins like legs to crawl across coral reefs and shuffle between tide pools. While it technically walks, it’s not developed enough to encounter it at, say, your local 7-Eleven. You’re not going to run into one on a hike.
Locals have known about it for several generations now, and they’ve even got their own name for it — kadedekedewa, or “lazy shark,” because while it does do something that sort of looks like walking, it does it quite slowly and deliberately.
Scientists Found a “Lazy Shark” That Walks Across Coral Reefs
The Lazy Shark was found during a nighttime expedition in Milne Bay led by researchers from Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast. It’s named after Ecologist Christine Dudgeon, since she was responsible for catching the first specimen while hand-collecting for a different shark species. Upon closer examination, the team noticed that instead of the leopard-print markings expected on related sharks, this one had distinctive white dashes and spots all over it that looked like Braille. That tipped them off to the possibility that this might be a whole new species.
Over the next few days, the team found 11 more such sharks, which genetic testing confirmed were, indeed, a whole new type of shark. Maybe the most remarkable fact about walking sharks isn’t even the fact that they can kind of, sort of walk. It’s that they can survive in tide pools with low oxygen content by lowering their heart rate and reducing blood flow to certain parts of the brain. This ability to navigate shallow coastal habitats has allowed them to adapt to environments where other sharks would die off instantly.
The lazy shark lives in a fairly small area, making it vulnerable to anything and everything that can potentially cause a Marine creature to face the prospect of extinction, including climate change, coral bleaching, habitat degradation, coastal development, and fishing. Several of its related walking shark cousins were already facing the existential threat of extinction as their habitats were encroached upon.
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