Ultra-Rare Megamouth Shark found then Eaten!

Unbelievable! Found, hassled and then eaten!

Rare Megamouth Shark
Ultra-Rare Megamouth Shark
In just a short time, one of the rarest sharks in the world went from swimming in Philippine waters to simmering in coconut milk.

The 13-foot-long (4-meter-long) megamouth shark (pictured), caught on March 30 by mackerel fishers off the city of Donsol, was only the 41st megamouth shark ever found, according to WWF-Philippines.

Fishers brought the odd creature—which died during its capture—to local project manager Elson Aca of WWF, an international conservation nonprofit.

Aca immediately identified it as a megamouth shark and encouraged the fishers not to eat it.

But the draw of the delicacy was too great: The 1,102-pound (500-kilogram) shark was butchered for a shark-meat dish called kinuout.

The megamouth shark species, discovered in 1976 off Oahu, Hawaii, was so bizarre that scientists had to create a new family and genus to classify it. With its giant mouth but tiny teeth, megamouth, like the whale shark, is a filter feeder that preys on tiny animals and appears to be no danger to humans.

Only 40 megamouth sharks, including 7 in the Philippines, have been found since the initial discovery. The shark is so rare that the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the megamouth species as “data deficient.”

Source: National Geographic – read the whole sordid story here.

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CW Staff
CW Staff

In the late 80s I started investigating UFOs and crop circles and joined the CCCS (Centre for Crop Circle Studies) and a local group researching strange sightings and reports along the south coast of Dorset (UK). In the early ’90s I started my own research group called SPS (Strange Phenomena Studies), this was renamed in 2004 to Cryptoworld.

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3 Comments

  1. Don’t know how a Megamouth shark tastes,but I have had shark before and its better than fish any day.And pics like that 1 above makes me wanna go to the Philippines and live.=]

  2. @Rebel, I must confess I found your comment rather distasteful and almost removed it. But I am hoping you are of course just joking? As the Megamouth Shark is extremely rare!

  3. I wonder why these villagers aren’t being brought up on charges for eating one of the rarest animals on earth…I guess Humans are more important than endangered species. Maybe this was the very last one of it’s species and since it was killed…why waste it, right?

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