Cue the Jaws music. Like the Olympics, Shark Week 2012 has come and gone. Although sharks may have a hard time distinguishing between friends and food, they’re still the kings of the ocean. In honor of Shark Week 2012, here are 25 crazy facts about sharks you can sink your teeth into.
The average shark has 40-45 teeth and can have up to seven rows of replacement teeth. Because sharks lose a lot of teeth and grow them back quickly, they often go through more than 30,000 teeth in a lifetime.Sharks do not have a single bone in their bodies. Their skeletons are made of cartilage.Hammerhead sharks are born with soft heads so they won’t jam their mothers’ birth canals.The Cookiecutter shark’s name stemmed from its unusual feeding method. The sharks attaches its mouth onto its victim and carves out a hunk of flesh, leaving a circular wound in its prey that resembles the hole a pastry cutter forms in dough.The first tiger shark pup to hatch inside its mother’s womb devours its unborn siblings until only two pups remain, one on each side of the womb.Sharks inhabited the earth 200 million years before the dinosaurs appeared and have changed only minimally during that time.Despite the fact that an almost equal amount of men and women swim in the ocean, men account for nearly 90 percent of shark attack victims.Shoes, chairs, boxes of nails, drums, entire bottles of wine, and the rear half of a horse are just some of the many bizarre objects that have been found in sharks’ stomachs over the years.About two-thirds of shark attacks on humans have occurred in less than six feet of water.About 30 people die during shark attacks each year, which means you have a greater chance of being killed by bee stings or struck dead by lightning.For every human killed by a shark, two million sharks are killed by humans.Scientists study shark cartilage to research possible cures for cancer because sharks rarely ever develop cancer.A Great White shark weighing 2,664 pounds and measuring almost 17 feet in length was the largest fish ever caught with a rod and reel.Bull sharks can live in both salt and fresh water by regulating the substances in their blood.Most sharks must swim constantly to force water through their mouths and over their gills because they lack the ability to pump water over their gills like the majority of fish.1 2
sometimes i cant believe to what the internet says cause on one website it will tell you one thing then on another website it will tell you a completely different thing!!
I am always amused that the phrase “shark-infested waters” is invariably used when even a single shark is noticed. The water is their home. A better description would be “human-invaded waters.”
As someone who has delivered sailboats around the world, I have often been asked by landlubbers, “Aren’t you afraid of sharks?” I always answer, “No, I’m not. I have an agreement with the sharks. They stay out of my boat and I stay out of their water. It’s working very well for both of us.”
^ In fact about 100 million sharks get killed by humans every year. From just recreational hunting, for their fins or/and other parts, or are simply accidentally killed by man made inventions such as boats, nets, chemicals and anything unfamiliar to the shark.
I’m a little concerned about the statistic relating to 2 million sharks killed per one human. The above stat states that 30 people die a year from attacks. So, 60 million sharks a year are killed by humans?? That seems astronomically high.
It is hard to find a exact number of how many sharks are killed a year but it is more like 73-100 million sharks a year, so 3 every second.