Sharks are usually long from 1 to 20 meters. Among the most devouring sharks there is Carcharhinus leucas (Zambezi shark), the only one that can survive in sweet water (4 to 5 minutes), I Carcharodon cars, great white shark (10 to 13 meters). Sharks that people are most afraid of are great white sharks, whose history starts 500 million years ago.
Their skeleton is the same as their relatives, manta rays and chimeras, is made from cartilage. Their skin is covered with tooth like scales. Unlike the fish with bony skeleton, no shark has a fish bubble, and their bodies don’t float in water and because of that they can change depth really fast. So that I wouldn’t sink, shark has to swim all the time. However, there are certain species that don’t have to do that, because they “can” find a weak underwater current which supplies them with a stream of water through their gills even when they are laying still.
Here are some facts about great white sharks:
10FACT No 10
White sharks are live-birthed, usually in litters of between four and seven individuals. Now they are called pups, but when they’re born they are between ½ and 1.5 meters, so that’s pretty big baby.
09FACT No 9
It takes a great white shark about ten to twelve years to reach maturity at which point the females are actually about a meter longer then the males – the largest recorded being over six meters.
08FACT No 8
White sharks are warm bodied. They’re not warm-blooded like us – they can’t maintain a perfectly stable temperature, but their internal organs are kept at up to thirteen degrees above the average temperature of the ambient water around them. The heat generated by their muscles is actually transferred to the blood in their veins as it returns from the shark’s extremities, so warms it up and keeps the core temperature a little bit hotter. This allows shark to venture into colder waters and also to have explosive power.
07FACT No 7
The tradeoff is the shark requires about ten times as much energy as if it didn’t heat its body and that’s why they need to feed on these blubber-rich seals and whale carcasses.
06FACT No 6
White sharks like to hunt when it’s light out because they use their eyesight to spot their prey. But when they open their jaws, their eyes actually roll back into their head to protect them and so they are actually blind when they are taking a bite.
05FACT No 5
They do like conditions that are little low visibility because they rely on stealth to track down their prey. It is a seal spots them coming, it’s basically game over because the seal is so much more maneuverable and it can definitely get away from shark.
04FACT No 4
They only eat sea mammals after they’re about 2.5 meters long, which is why most of sharks are quite large. Before that, they’re diet consists mainly of fish.
03FACT No 3
The gestation period is thought to be about eighteen months that leads to a two to three year reproduction cycle and with such small litters that means it takes a long time for this shark population to recover.
02FACT No 2
There are a couple misconceptions about great white sharks. One is that they can’t get cancer and that’s led to a lot of people hunting them down and trying use their fins as an anti-cancer soup. But in reality sharks get cancer just like we do.
01FACT No 1
Another misconception is sharks are coastal creatures that just cruise the beaches waiting to bite people. In reality the sharks spend much of their time way, way out at sea and very deep, over a kilometer deep.
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