Photo: NOAA/Wikipedia
Of all the animal families (okay, technically "classes"), it is perhaps the sharks that are given the very best names. Where else will you find names as spectacularly weird as the Birdbeak Dogfish, the Tasselled Wobbegong, or the Bowmouth Guitarfish?One of these excellently-named creatures, the False Catshark, was recently caught off the waters of Scotland, which gives us license to talk about how bizarre this fish is: we're talking a 50-pound oily liver, hundreds of teeth, eggs that suck yolk from other eggs, and a body soft enough that the animal is sometimes casually referred to as a "sofa shark."Rare "sofa shark" found off Hebrides http://t.co/c8NWxTyi3D pic.twitter.com/uytR552ora
— Scotsman (@TheScotsman) September 30, 2015
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Capelo was wrong; the False Catshark does in fact have a nictitating membrane. But he was also right in that it is related to, but not a member of, the catshark family. Sometimes when you're wrong you're actually right!Anyway. The False Catshark, typically dark brown (though sometimes light grey), is a pretty big shark, at its largest nearly 10 feet long and 275 pounds in weight. But a significant portion of that weight, up to 25 percent, is in its liver, an enormous organ filled with super gross shark liver oil. That liver helps the shark stay buoyant and float where it wants to be, just off the sandy sea floor, where it chomps down with its enormous, 200-toothed mouth on bony fishes and shrimp. Oh and also, like, whatever else it finds; a 1992 study of False Catshark stomach contents found that it'll also eat human garbage, "including potatoes, a pear, a plastic bag, and a soft drink can in one Atlantic specimen." Haha, soft drink cans! It's like a sea-goat."…a sort of egg cannibalism in which the stronger eggs feed on the weaker eggs"
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