JAPAN: Japanese aquarium struggles to keep a deepsea prehistoric shark alive but fails again

Another deep sea monster has turned up again off the shores of Japan just a month after deep sea 'living fossil sharks' were caught by Japanese fishermen at the same shores. The deep sea 'living fossil' shark, called the goblin shark due to its large snout, usually lives 1,200 meters underwater but had been first spotted swimming in shallow waters off the coast of Tokyo bay at the end of March. The sharks, while not rare in deep sea, are rarely seen alive and very little is known about them. Just days before the shark was found, a different type of deep sea shark, an eel-like rare prehistoric shark called a "frilled shark", appeared from the deep seas off the coast of Japan, making the goblin shark the second deep sea shark to have been found in the same month. Furthermore, those sharks were captured separately at almost the same ocean in February. A marine park official believed a particular seasonal up-current from the deep seas carried these sharks up to the surface. "Though we are not sure as to why we could capture several deep sea sharks in such a short period, we know clearly that those sharks have been found and captured around Tokyo bay since the old days. I suppose the reason of their frequent appearances may be connected with its geological formation where water depth suddenly drops from shallow to deep sea," said Satoshi Tada, a deep-sea shark keeper at the Tokyo Sea Life Park. Though the frilled shark died immediately, the Goblin shark was immediately removed into a pressured water tank in an aquarium in the Tokyo Sea Life park to keep it alive. Their attempt failed when it died on Tuesday (April 10) morning, nearly two weeks after being moved to the aquarium. It lived almost three times longer than the previous case, when the aquarium displayed the shark in a regular fish tank. For the aquarium, keeping deep-sea creatures in a pressure water tank was to explore the unknown world. "It is safe to say that this experience proved that pressure water tank could be useful for keeping deep-sea shark alive to some extent," Tada said. An autopsy is scheduled to find out more about the shark. A quirky story.

ITN Source | April 13, 2007

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