After more than a century, the smoothtooth blacktip shark has been rediscovered
A smoothtooth blacktip shark discovered at a fish market in Kuwait.
Image: Dr. Alec Moore
After his 1902 trip to Yemen, scholar and naturalist Wilhelm Hein returned with a variety of
plants and
animals,
which he donated to the Vienna Museum. One of these specimens, a shark,
sat unnoticed for more than 80 years. In 1985 it was identified as the
first (and only known) specimen of
Carcharhinus leiodon, the
smoothtooth blacktip shark. Because no others had ever been found by
scientists, Alec Moore, regional vice chair of the International Union
for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Shark Specialist Group’s Indian Ocean
group, says that “some suspected it might be extinct or not a valid
species.”
In 2008, during a
Shark Conservation Society research expedition to Kuwait’s
sharq
fish market (the name is a coincidence, it means east in Arabic), Moore
says that “amongst the many species of whaler shark was one which
looked very similar, but different, to a couple of other species.”
Later analysis
revealed that although this specimen was more than 3,000 kilometers
from where Hein caught his, this was a smoothtooth blacktip, the first
new individual seen by scientists in over a century.
>>View a slide show of shark species at fish markets
These sharks are currently considered “Vulnerable” to extinction by on the
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,
an assessment that was made before their rediscovery by Dr. Moore and
his team. More recent studies in fish markets throughout the region have
located 47 additional smoothtooth blacktip sharks, greatly increasing
what scientists know about this species with and reported in a 2013
paper in
Marine & Freshwater Research.
The new study included some of the first data on how large smoothtooth
blacktips can grow, how many pups they can bear and their habitat usage
as well as other information needed for an effective conservation and
management plan in the future.
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