Copepods or WTF is in that shark’s mouth??

So Shark Week is well underway. I’ll take back what I said about Ultimate Air Jaws, the show was fantastic especially the ending sequence. I’ll still give Expedition great white the edge on being the coolest show about the whites, but Ultimate was very cool. Then we come to Into the Shark Bite. The point of the show is to have the shark bite an object that is protecting the camera so we can see into the shark’s mouth when it bites.

The show has some good footage of sharks but was pretty pointless until they showed inside the shark’s mouth and then, “Oh my god what is that?!?” It looked like a white barnacle attached to the shark’s gums and then a patch of hair came flying out of it. It was a Copepod.

These things are pretty common apparently. In a paper I found written by George Benz and Susan Dippenaar they go on to say that the blue shark holds the record for having the most different kinds of Copepods. They could have some on their pectoral fins, on their nose, in their gills, and on their body. There may be around 3,000 of these things living on the shark.

The one I saw on the white shark lives between the teeth. There are some that attach to mako sharks that live on their tongue and the roof of their mouth. Virtually ever Greenland shark has these things living on their eyes. On their eyes. They go partially blind because of these things. And that is all the time I’m going to spend on these things, because looking for images of these things has been pretty nasty. On the bright side, I couldn’t find pictures of the hairy looking ones inside the shark’s mouth. So on that note, Happy Shark Week!