Indo-Australian cat shark: learned to walk freely along the coast and lives without water for 2 hours (6 photos)

If filmmakers were a little more interested in biology, we would have long ago gotten a horror movie with a shark that walks along the coast on its fins, as if on paws, devouring tourists and vacationers. Because such fish exist - Indo-Australian cat sharks! True, they can only scare slippers. But no one is stopping you from giving your artwork a little blood-red color!





All cats love to bask in the sun. Even if these cats are sharks!

I think deduction has already told you where these beasts are located. Cat sharks parade along the seabed near Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. While other sharks hover over the reefs in search of prey, cat sharks prefer to grovel. Literally. But how gracefully they do it! Smooth bends of the entire carcass, now to the right, now to the left - sharks clearly borrowed these movements from lizards.



The size of cat sharks relative to other sharks is very modest: the maximum length is 1 meter.

A similar feature appeared quite recently - only 9 million years ago. It doesn't seem like a long time ago, but sharks have been hanging out in the oceans for almost 400 million years, so muscular fins and a powerful tail are, in a sense, breakthrough technology.





Woke up, stretched, smiled!

True, unlike our fish ancestors, who first came to land, cat sharks for some reason do not rush to the surface. They vegetate at the bottom of shallow waters. And this despite the ability to live without water for almost two hours! That is why sharks switched exclusively to a nocturnal lifestyle. The method of movement is obligatory: the one who walks in the water will always be slower than the one who swims in the water. And therefore it is easier for the victim to escape, and it is easier for the predator to catch up with you.



Hey baby, check out the bitsuha!

When the shark wakes up, all the fish and small crustaceans hide in shelters: cracks, crevices and under stones. But they don’t realize that this is what the predator is trying to achieve. In narrow spaces, the ability to crawl becomes ultimate - the fish leaves at dawn already well-fed.



Nobody threw me ashore. I came here to rest myself.

Since 2006, scientists have discovered just nine species of shark walkers. But at the moment, three of them have already escaped and ended up in the Red Book. But this is not due to hunting, destruction of animal homes or environmental problems. There were initially few sharks. To find out what was what, we had to conduct a separate study.



- Guys, check it out, I learned how to crawl on walls! - Andryukh, in ordinary fish this is called SWIM.

It turned out that the number of sharks was thinned out by ancient changes in the land. The Indonesian islands are not the calmest region even now, but at the time of the emergence of this kind of land, the earth was literally shaking from the butting of lithospheric plates. The shores changed shape, islands disappeared and appeared, and at this time the ancestors of sharks migrated south. As a result, fish were cut off from each other in bays, on the coasts of islands and in the shadow of continents. And when you only know how to walk along the bottom, then colonization is slow.