melbourne, australia
AP
—
It was an unexpected sight to see the ungainly body of a shark languidly running across the barren ocean floor, too deep for sunlight to reach.
Researcher Alan Jamieson said this week that many experts thought there were no sharks in Antarctica’s frigid waters until the sleeper shark waddled gingerly into the spotlight of a video camera. The shark, photographed in January 2025, was a sizeable specimen with an estimated length of 3 to 4 meters (10 to 13 feet).
“We went there not expecting to see sharks, because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t see sharks in Antarctica,” Jamison said.
“And it’s not even a small shark. It’s a mass of sharks. These things are tanks,” he added.
The camera, operated by the Mindelow UWA Deep Sea Research Center, which studies life in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, was installed off the coast of the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. It lies well inside the boundary of the Southern Ocean (also known as the Southern Ocean), which is defined as below the 60th parallel of south latitude.
The center granted permission to The Associated Press on Wednesday to publish the images.
The shark was at a depth of 490 meters (1,608 feet) and the water temperature was almost -1.27 degrees Celsius (34.29 degrees Fahrenheit).
The skates rest on the ocean floor, seemingly unperturbed by the passing shark. This was no surprise since scientists already knew that the skate ray, a member of the shark-like family of stingrays, had a range far south.
Mr Jamieson, founding director of the research center based at the University of Western Australia, said he had found no record of another shark being found in the Southern Ocean.
Peter Cain, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University who is not affiliated with the research centre, agreed that sharks had never been recorded this far south.
Climate change and ocean warming could move sharks to colder waters in the southern hemisphere, but data on range changes were limited due to the remoteness of the area near Antarctica, Cain said.
Slow-moving sleeper sharks could have been in Antarctica for long periods of time without anyone noticing, he said.
“This is amazing. The shark was in the right place, the camera was in the right place, and we got some great footage,” Cain said. “That’s very important.”
Sleeper shark populations in the Southern Ocean are likely sparse and difficult for humans to spot, Jamieson said.
The shark photographed remained at a depth of about 500 meters (1,640 feet) along the ocean floor, which slopes into deeper water. Jamison said the shark was able to maintain its depth because it was the warmest of several layers of water that built up to the surface.
The Southern Ocean is stratified, or stratified, to a depth of about 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) due to conflicting properties, such as colder, denser water from below not mixing easily with fresh water flowing from melting ice from above.
Jamieson suspects that other Antarctic sharks live at similar depths, feeding on the carcasses of dead whales, giant squids and other marine life that have sunk to the bottom.
There are very few survey cameras installed at specific depths in the Southern Ocean. These can only operate during the southern hemisphere summer months from December to February.
“The other 75 percent of the year, no one sees anything. I think that’s why we sometimes get surprises like this,” Jamison said.
