Ghost sharks have a new member of the family (Picture: NOAA)
Ghost sharks, as their names suggest, are rather hard to find – but the family has a new member after scientists caught one of the elusive beasts.
Oh, and it has a sex organ on its head.
The fish, which had never been spotted before, was hauled up by a team of scientists from nearly a mile beneath the surface in the Andaman Sea off the coast of Thailand, near Phuket.
It has big, black, iridescent eyes with feathery-looking fins, a sharp tail and gigantic green eyes nearly one-third the length of its head.
Genetic testing revealed that the fish is an entirely new species, bringing the world’s number of known ghost sharks up to 54.
It has been named Chimaera Supapae – chimaera because the group, or genus, often look as though they have been created from different fish, and Supapae after Supap Monkolprasit, who dedicated her life to studying fish until she died in 2013.
The ghost shark nickname is inspired by their eyes, which seem to glow in the dark and give an eerie appearance.
The newly discovered ghost shark species (Picture: David A. Ebert)
And like other male ghost sharks, the fish has a sex organ on the top of its head known as a tentaculum, which it uses to help hold the female in place while mating.
As with all new species, it has taken some time to confirm the finding.
The specimen was collected during a 2018 deep-sea expedition with the Thailand Department of Fisheries and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
After closer examination and genetic analysis that showed no matches, the team concluded that it was a new species.
The team said the new ghost shark differs from other species as it has a massive head with a short snout, huge oval eyes and ‘deciduous skin’ which flakes off. This could be a defence mechanism to help prey slip out of the grasp of predators.
Scientists described the discovery in a paper published in the journal Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.