Dalatias licha, aka the kitefin shark. Photo: Mallefet/Louvain/Frontiers in Marine Science
R
esearchers
have known for a while now that some sharks can glow in the dark. But not many. Until recently, it was only thought that around a dozen species lit up in the dark depths of the ocean. A new study in the journal
Frontiers in Marine Science reported that three more can do it, and one species, the kitefin shark, can grow up to six feet in length.
The discovery was made when shark researchers were poking around off the eastern coast of New Zealand, and it adds a whole lot more information to the bioluminescence canon. The expedition, in which the researchers pulled blackbelly lanternsharks, southern lanternsharks, and kitefin sharks up from an area of the deep sea known as the “twilight zone,” was yet another reminder that there’s still so much going on in the ocean that we don’t know about. The twilight zone is the region from a depth of 660 to 3,300 feet, where, as the name implies, light filtering down from the surface is scarce.