Did anyone see the news about the extremely rare frilled shark captured and killed by Japanese Marine park staff? Most likely it was already ill, but capturing it and moving it to the marine park certainly did it no good. :mad: It makes me very sad. I met a frilled shark once, they are actually quite nice.

I'm moving this over to the from the News forum... I hadn't seen this until now, apparantly I live in a complete news vacuum because everyone else at work had seen it. In case you're like me and you hadn't seen it either, here is the video.

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When I first saw the video, I thought that it was sick/dying in the video because of the way the gills were wide open. Then I did some research and found out that it's normal for their gills to be frilled out like that. Very incredible creature. It's sad though that this one died. I'm sure they didn't have any ill-intentions in the capture. I'm sure they just wanted to have their vets check it out, then release it again. Unfortuneately, for an already sick fish, the treatment itself can often stress the fish out and speed up the death. I hope that is all that happened in this case, and not something more sinister.

Thanks for posting the video Sergeant Major. Thanks too for the explanation of the gills. Now it is easy to see where the shark got its name. I looked up the name of the fish in Wikipedia last night and it said they tend to get caught in fishing nets... I probably should have read further to see what they eat and what fish were being caught in the news story. That is an incredible fish with some serious teeth!

That shark looks kool. ITs a shame it died. If the shark was rare then it would be common sense to save it instead of making shark soup with it.