Watch rare sea creature lurk in shallow waters off UK. ‘Don’t see this every day’
A fisherman was watching the boats steam back into a United Kingdom harbor on his lunchtime when he saw something stick out of the water.
It was a fin, moving slowly to shore.
“Of all the wildlife I’ve seen in the harbor, including dolphins, seals and even deer swimming one early morning, (it) was definitely the biggest surprise,” William Harvey, owner of W. Harvey & Sons shellfish company, told CornwallLive on Aug. 12.
Harvey pulled out his phone, took a video and shared it on Facebook on Aug. 10.
“Don’t see this every day!” he said in the video caption.
Lurking in the shallow waters was a blue shark, rarely seen off the coast of Penzance in England.
“This shark is BLUE, and it is one of the most beautiful sharks,” the Shark Research Institute said on its website. “It is a slim, graceful shark with a long, conical snout, large eyes (no spiracles), and long, narrow scythe-shaped pectoral fins will in front of the first dorsal win with no interdorsal ridge.”
The sharks can grow to be about 13 feet long, according to the Oregon Wildlife Foundation.
Blue sharks typically stay in the deep waters off the continental shelf under the surface of the ocean, according to the Shark Research Institute.
Only rarely do they come to shore, the institute said, and when they do, they choose the cover of night.
This shark, however, wasn’t afraid to explore the coastline.
A year ago, a blue shark bit a snorkeler on the leg in Cornwall in what was considered an “unusual” attack, according to Marine Officer Matt Slater from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust.
“You have to go a long way off shore and you have to create a very long oil slick of sardine blood and juice and eventually the (blue) sharks will follow that to you,” Slater told CornwallLive in 2022. “ ... They’re such beautiful animals. And usually very, very peaceful. They’re inquisitive, they’re not at all aggressive, they’re beautiful, amazing animals.”
It is hard to accurately estimate the number of blue sharks globally because they are a common target for shark fishing, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
They are also often caught up in fishing nets in deep water, the IUCN reports, leading to the species being listed as “near threatened,” on the Red List in 2018.
Cornwall is on the southwest tip of England, about 270 miles west of London.
This story was originally published August 17, 2023 at 5:53 PM with the headline "Watch rare sea creature lurk in shallow waters off UK. ‘Don’t see this every day’."
