The Pop-Out-Jaw Shark Nobody Had Ever Filmed
The News
Scientists in Hawaii and Australia just shared something thrilling: for the very first time, an extremely rare deep-sea creature called a goblin shark has been filmed ALIVE in the deep ocean where it actually lives. Until now, all we'd ever seen were goblin sharks that had been accidentally pulled to the surface. And — wait until you hear what its jaw can do!
Professor Pip stood in his cozy wood-paneled lab, beside a tall round aquarium tank lit from above by a single beam of light. The water in the tank looked dark and mysterious, like the deepest part of the ocean.
He patted his lab coat pockets, gave a little hop of excitement, and pulled out a small wooden shark toy with a long pointy pink snout. It had a curious little hinge along the bottom of its jaw.
Mia and Jun pressed their noses right against the aquarium glass. "What lives in there, Professor?" Jun whispered.
"Today, my friends," Pip said, his tail swishing, "we are meeting the most mysterious shark in the entire ocean. The goblin shark. It lives so deep that no one — NO ONE — had ever seen one alive in its home until now!"
"Why not?" asked Mia, her eyes huge.
"Because the goblin shark lives down here," Pip said, pointing to the very bottom of the dim tank, "in waters more than two thousand meters deep. That's about two MILES below the surface. It's so dark and so far down that to see one, you have to send a robot."
"A robot SHARK?" cried Jun.
"A robot submarine," Pip said, his eyes sparkling. "Scientists call them ROVs — Remotely Operated Vehicles. The crew drives them from a ship on the surface, using long cables, like the world's longest video game controller. And THIS is what their robot saw."
He held up the little wooden shark. "Watch what its jaw does." He squeezed a tiny lever on the toy's belly. SHOOM! The jaw snapped FORWARD, way out past the snout, then snapped right back. The children jumped.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?!" Mia shrieked.
"That," Pip said, "is called a protrusible jaw. It means the jaw can ZOOM out and back like a slingshot. The real goblin shark's jaw flies forward at three meters every second — faster than YOU can run! It catches little fish before they even know it's there."
"Oh!" cried Jun. "Like a frog's tongue catching a fly — but a SHARK!"
"Exactly right!" Pip beamed. "Scientists call it 'slingshot feeding.' The team saw goblin sharks near Jarvis Island in 2019 and again deep in the Tonga Trench in 2024. Both spots are way out in the Pacific Ocean. We thought goblin sharks only lived in a few places. Now we know they swim across a HUGE part of the ocean we'd never imagined."
Pip looked into the dark tank. Somewhere — right now — a real goblin shark was gliding through the deep, slinging that wondrous jaw, doing what it has done for millions of years, all on its own.
"Now I wonder," Pip said softly, "what OTHER deep-sea creatures might still be down there, in the dark, waiting for someone to come find them?"
Spark a Conversation
- What other "deep-sea secrets" do you think might still be hiding out there?
- If you designed a robot submarine, what's one feature you'd give it that no one has thought of yet?
- Why might it help a shark to have a jaw that shoots forward, instead of one that just opens wide?