Sofa Shark Spotted Off the Coast of Scotland

First Posted: Oct 07, 2015 10:55 AM EDT
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Researchers conducting a deep sea survey, including a shark tag-and-release program, off the coast of Scotland encountered a sofa shark on Tuesday Oct. 6. The shark was a rare site for the area, having only been spotted near Scotland one other time in the last 15 years, according to The Scotsman.

Also known as the false catshark, the bizarre-looking fish was a female that measured more than 6.5 feet long and weighed almost 132 lbs (60 kgs), which was more than double the weight of the previous find in 2000. Sofa sharks can reach a length of nearly 10 feet, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Sofa sharks, or psuedotrakias microdon, live in the depths of the ocean, and can grow to be almost 10 feet long. The rare animal is found in various locations, from Iceland to New Zealand. It primarily lives off the continental and insular slopes, 650 to 6,200 feet down.

The IUCN stated that one of the reasons the shark is so rare is that it usually produces a maximum of two embryos at a time, and takes many years to reach sexual maturity, making its population somewhat sparse, according to Newsweek.

It got the name "sofa" as a result of its soft features, including large flabby muscles and an oily liver, which makes up 25 percent of its weight, and allows it to hover at the ocean's bottom.

"I was pretty surprised when it landed in our boat," marine biologist Francis Neat said. "We quickly measured and weighed it before sending it back into the water.... It's not unique to Scotland but it's certainly interesting to look at-it's a big and baggy-looking creature [that] looks a lot like a soft, discarded sofa when it's just lying there."

Neat, a part of the Scottish Shark Tagging Programme, has been helping find and tag sharks in Scotland's waters, to get a total species count. This year, the program has tagged 72 species, 40 more than it found just a few years ago.

"We've never seen this type of shark in Scotland before and it's great to add it to our long list of species in Scotland," a spokesman for the program said.

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