Sharks don’t have to be big to be scary, but it doesn’t hurt. Jaws, best known for being the main character of Jaws, freaked people out because it was both mad for human blood and extremely big. Baby Shark, the youngest member of the family from that kid’s song, is not frightening because it is, as the song’s title suggests, just a little baby.
Even though marine biologists and animal experts have assured us that we really shouldn’t be so spooked by sharks, no matter how media portrays them, seeing a big fish with big sharp teeth still stirs a primal fear in all of us. As an OceanX video that shows deep sea explorers encountering a gigantic bluntnose sixgill shark shows, this feeling is hard to shake.
Look at this fucking thing! When the clip starts, the sixgill emerges from the ocean floor like something out of Revelation, clouds of sand billowing around her as she swims upward and gulps the crew’s bait into her awful gaping maw. The pair of men inside the sub laugh in disbelief at the shark as it passes across their field of view. One of them says, “This is a monster” before the sixgill momentarily disappears from sight.
The most striking part is when she comes up close to the sub a moment later, aiming one unnervingly human-looking pupil directly at the camera before rolling her eye back so only the whites show. The sub’s passengers mention that the shark is “definitely bigger than [the OceanX submersible] is long,” but don’t mention exactly how large that is while they concern themselves with firing a satellite tag into the creature.
Digg’s post of the clip mentions that bluntnose sixgills “can grow up to 26 feet in length,” though, and the YouTube upload’s description informs viewers that the bluntnose sixgill is an “ancient species [that] predates most dinosaurs, and is a dominant predator of the deep sea ecosystem.” In essence, the shark is big as hell and comes from a long, long line of big as hell predators.
Hey, at least it’s an awe-inspiring, terrifying leviathan that was found this time and not, as in other, recent scientific dives, a bunch of our trash drifting around the ocean floor. We’ll take a mammoth creature from the deep over our own awful legacy as a species any day.
