A famous scientific magazine has highlighted one of the very strange sea creatures, which it described as an “alien object” because of its frightening shape and the shape of its teeth, which is somewhat similar to the shape of the teeth of the frightening alien creatures that are shown in science fiction movies from time to time.
Sneaking in the depths of the oceans is a strange fish with green eyes that resemble the eyes of “alien creatures”, according to scientific sources, with its strange doughy body and strange ghost-like color with rows of pointed teeth. .
Killing circles of victims pulled out with very sharp teeth
Dubbed “Cookiecutter” by scientists, these sharks are famous for sneaking around and snatching small, circle-shaped pieces of sharks and much larger whales.
According to the new research published in the scientific journal “Live Science”, this intrusive killer, which is only about 50 centimeters long, does not pose a terror to whales and sharks only, but to all other marine creatures of all sizes.
The first previous observations that scientists recorded of this fish were a circular mark of meat that was recovered from whales and large sharks, but it was clear through studies that these sharks also feed on animals at the bottom of the food chain, which gives them a unique and important role in the ecosystem. for the oceans.
These fish “feed on everything from the largest and most dangerous predators, such as white sharks, and everything you can imagine, to the smallest of the smallest creatures,” said Aaron Carlyle, assistant professor in the College of Marine Sciences at the University of Delaware, USA, and lead author of the new study. ‘, noting that no creature could do something similar to what this shark does.
The “Cookiecutter shark” lives in tropical and subtropical waters and can live at depths of more than 4,920 feet (1,500 metres), according to the study.
A killer that causes pain to adults and children in the oceans
People usually see these fish at night near the surface of the water when fishing for large fish in the depths of the ocean.
The team examined the ecological DNA (eDNA) of these fish, and studied their diet of fish, and arrived at surprising results.
“Environmental DNA is an increasingly popular and powerful tool that operates under the idea that if an animal swims in the ocean, it will throw off the DNA in the water,” Carlisle said. “So if you take a sample of the water and filter it, you can extract the DNA of everything that was present in that water mass and identify the species that are there. So we tested it on the contents of the stomach.”
According to the results of the study published in the scientific journal “Nature”, the researchers found that these sharks mostly feed on smaller species in the lower depths of the oceans, including crustaceans, squid and small fish, and some of these prey may be small enough to swallow them whole.
The study showed that giant sharks and large whales in the high ocean make up less than 10% of the diet of these sharks.