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Cool. When do you ever see a pink shark? Within minutes, the shark is coming around with a vengeance. Oh. It did it. It did. He totally He put out his jaw. He's angry. Angry goblin shark. So maybe we could grab some food and see if he'll eat it. If Dr. Nica can film a goblin strike, he'll be able to study those incredible jaws in even greater detail. Oh. Oh, Massive and stealthy with a bite so devastating they can tear you in half in a split second. This monster we know well, but over half the world's 500 shark species live in deep water nearly 1,000 ft down.
How big they are, how strong, how aggressive, no one really knows. Researchers hope the dead whale dropped in Japan's Sagami Bay will help them find out. Today, marine biologist Dr. Greg Stone is leading the hunt. We know very little about deep sea sharks. You know, over the years, we've learned quite a bit about shallow water sharks because we can get to them and we can see them. They're in the reef. They're in the dive zone. But the deep sea sharks are they're they're so deep in the ocean that it's hard to get there.
We're going to troll you up. Pressures are extremely high. The temperatures are extremely low. And it's only been in the last several decades that we've had uh underwater vehicles, robots, submarines, and whatnot that can get down, you know, into these thousand foot depths. Okay. The deeper you go, the stranger it gets. This is stuff like out of horror movies. It's like I mean, these things are really scary looking. Since the 19th century, 40 different species of deep sea sharks have been spotted in Japanese waters.
Some of them found nowhere else. To try to capture them in action, the team on board the Aluchia is setting up multiple cameras around the rotting whale carcass. The cameras will record any predators that emerge from the darkness, even when the subs and scientists aren't there. Over the last few years, the scientists and filmmakers have made multiple expeditions in search of these aliens of the deep. And they're getting help from the best guides around, deep sea fishermen. What's special about Sigami Bay is that the deep sea can be found really close to shore. Like it's because of the geology of Japan that well you go out a
few miles and suddenly you're in 2,000 ft of water. As the fishermen head to the most likely shark hangouts, the film crew loads fish into a cage attached to their camera. They also use a robotic camera to follow any unusual creatures that might show up. These remote cameras capture scenes that no other technology can see. There's not a person there. There's not a noisy submarine in the background. It's kind of like a camera trap like we have on land, but it's in the ocean. And you get to see what the sharks are doing when people aren't there.
Over 4 years, the cameras have been lowered to the sea floor more than 200 times. at 20 hot spots where fishermen have accidentally pulled sharks from the depths. Almost immediately, a glowing eye emerges from the darkness. It's a shark called the roughskinned dogfish, nearly 5 ft long. Down here in the pitch black, those glowing eyes give it an edge. There is no sunlight at these depths, but organisms make light through biological mechanisms using phosphorus.
It's adapted its eyes in order to see these essentially very dim lights in the deep sea. As the cameras descend even deeper, a giant emerges from the darkness. These alien creatures can grow to over 20 ft in length, bigger than the biggest great white. The smell of the bait seems to trigger its hunting instinct. Back in the Gulf of Mexico, Dean Grubs and his crew are pulling in a line from more than 2,000 ft deep. Generally, the deeper we go, the fewer animals we catch, but the animals change.
You never know what's going to come up next. Oh, yeah. I can see the slime coming off of it now. It's a trap full of hagfish right there. Hagfish are a really important scavenger in the deep sea. Most of the things that die and sink in the deep sea, a lot of it gets eaten by hag fish. You see this slime they produce as a defensive mechanism. You see all these little dark spots along the tail? They go along the whole body. Those are slime pores. So, they have these little glands down inside. That's all they do is make
this slime. This guy will probably have 85 to 90 slime pores on each side of its body. So, they never run out. Hagfish are one of the few species safe from the jaws of a shark. When seawater interacts with the slime secreted from the hagfish, it swells up and forms a net of mucus, sort of like a slimy spider's web that can choke predators like this shark to death. In La Hoya, California, marine biologist Dr. David Gruber is trying out his shark vision camera for the first time as he drops 100 ft down the scripts canyon looking for a shark that glows in the dark called a swell shark. We hope to capture the biofllororesence of these sharks.
What makes it possible for animals to absorb light and give it out as another color is this really special class of protein uh called the green fluorescent protein family. If one of these animals in the ocean is making the DNA for one of these proteins, we could take that DNA and use it for medical reasons. Swell sharks are found from Monterey, California to southern Mexico and along the coast of Chile. They can grow up to about 3 feet long. The other thing about the swell shark is these are notoriously bad swimmers. These are not the Michael Phelps of sharks. When they feel threatened, they can gulp down a huge amount of water or air and swell up about twice their size.
And that'll be a pretty hard thing for a bigger shark to try to eat. This area is home to a whole host of interesting fish, including another truly bizarre creature that can also expand its body in amazing ways. The sarcastic fringe head is only a foot long, but it's still a ferocious deep sea predator. Like the swell shark, it tends to stay hidden most of the time, but if another fringe head tries to steal its turf, a mouth wrestling battle ensues. You know, it might look like romance, but it's war. As Gruber and his team drop down the canyon wall, they catch a glimpse of a familiar leopard patterned skin.
It's a swell shark lounging on the canyon shelf. Ruber and the crew get to work. First, they filmed the shark in natural light, the way a human eye would see it. Next, they film the shark with special blue lights that stimulate shark fluoresence. And then, using the sharkey camera, the otherwise bland looking swell shark transforms into a neon green alien. What we found in these swell sharks is that the biofllororescent property is only in the skin. So it's just on the surface. And we think swell sharks are glowing green because of two things. One, it's a way for them to find each other and
attract each other. And it's a way to kind of further camouflage themselves on the reef. These sharks go back 400 million years. And now we are just beginning to understand this world and what role it's playing for them. I think we got we collected just a ton of information on these sharks. We still know so little about sharks. Back on solid ground, Craig reunites with Saw Shark expert Jane Williamson. And finally, the pair gets to examine the footage. The first ever to document a saw shark's point of view. Okay, it's nearing the bottom. Mhm. And now it's going to just start cruising along the seafloor.
This is incredible. Really incredible footage. What stands out is that the saw sharks swim and swim. So you can see, oh wow, look at this. It's something no one expected and very different from their sedentary cousins, the saw fish. So how far do you think this moved in 2 hours? I'm going to say maybe a half a kilometer or kilometer. And it only stopped for maybe a total of 10 minutes out of the two hours.
There's one brief encounter with another saw shark, but no hunting on this tape. The camera will need more time in the water to reveal how saw sharks use their saws. Still, this is a fascinating first look into the hidden life of a saw shark. Little sharks always on the move. It correlates with the data starting to come in from Jane's tags. So, a month after we deployed the tags, the first one pops up. Holy cow. So, this is where you tagged the animal. This is where we tagged them. This is where I wound up. The first one. In the months since she tagged the shark, it traveled from northeastern Tasmania all the way down the coast some 180 m.
It means that they're not just hanging in the one area, which gives me hope for this species. Though fishermen don't target saw sharks, whatever they bring up gets sold for food. The more these sharks move, the less vulnerable they are to over fishing. Hard to tell from two dots, but there is hope in these two dots. I think we learned a ton about these animals in just a really short time span. Back in Tokyo Bay, it's another early morning and the last chance for Vicky Vasquez and Dave Eert to find and tag their own elusive alien.
How do you feel? I feel cold. And uh super hopeful that we'll get something uh cool. Maybe a big goblin shark. And then go on. Their patience is rewarded. Oh man, we got a goblin. It's a young goblin shark. We got a goblin shark. And it's alive. We need to get in water really fast. The trip up from the bottom has stunned this young shark. All right, hang in there, little buddy. To have any chance of tagging and releasing it, they need to revive it first.
Oh my gosh, that's so cool. When do you ever see a pink shark? Within minutes, the shark is coming around with a vengeance. Oh. It did it. It did. He totally PUT OUT HIS JAW. He's angry now. He's angry. Angry goblin. Angry goblin shark. So maybe we could grab some food and see if he'll eat it. If Dr. Nica can film a goblin strike, he'll be able to study those incredible jaws in even greater detail. Oh, there. Oh, he did it. I could just I could felt those muscles just tighten up. Right. Oh, there he goes. There
The shark delivers several times. To even be able to like entice it to show its behavior and be able to capture that is amazing. You just don't expect them to perform like that. We already know that goblins strike farther and faster than any other shark. The shark in the previous video snatched its prey in just over 0.23 seconds. After studying these images frame by frame, Dr. Nica calculates that this one strikes in a blazing 0.16 seconds, over 40% faster, the fastest bite ever recorded in the fish world. Surprising for such an otherwise sluggish creature.
I am very happy. Exciting. When it comes to alien sharks, evolution has dealt some strange hands. reminds me of a dinosaur. And few are more bizarre than the environmental adaptations found on a bull shark. It's the shape shifter of the shark world, able to alter its body to suit its environment. It can leave salt water and move into fresh water, a substance toxic to all other sharks. Bull sharks have been found in estuaries and rivers and everything throughout the world. The way that this animal is able to do this is to actually change its body chemistry. When a bull shark makes the transition from the ocean into rivers, fresh water
moves through its gills into its body. It has highly specialized kidneys which rapidly process the toxic fresh water and expel it. Their urine rate increases up to 15 times, which means they're just constantly flushing that fresh water out of their system. Bull sharks have been spotted on the Mississippi as far as Illinois and 2500 miles up the Amazon in Peru. Shark. Holy. Shark.
Their ability to hunt where no other sharks can survive makes this alien particularly dangerous to people. They have this reputation of being a really nasty shark. Like the whole reason it got its name is because of its boldness and its power. And it has these amazing serrated teeth that are just designed to cut huge hunks of food and make off with them. It's a remarkable environmental adaptation. But sometimes nature takes a turn from alien adaptation to alien mutation. This fetal dusky shark was discovered in Mexico in 2011. It has a rare defect called cyclopia, a cyclops shark. It's unlikely that shark would have lived had it gotten out of the womb, but it's a fascinating example of how this
phenomena happens in animals from time to time. And in 2008, a fetal blue shark was discovered off Australia with two heads. Since then, even more have been found. While these mal formations could be caused by viral infections or metabolic disorders, some experts worry it is the result of pollution or a dwindling gene pool due to over fishing. My concern about the deep sea and the sharks that live there are that human activities are changing that environment before we've even had a chance to explore it. A stark warning that the health of the oceans may be in serious jeopardy. Of the wild and bizarre alien sharks we've revealed in the last 5 years, many are facing an uncertain future.
The kite fin and the greenland shark are nearthreatened. The basking shark, the sand tiger, and the thresher are listed as vulnerable. The hammerhead and the whale shark are both endangered and the sawfish is critically endangered. The next stop is extinction.
