Did you know Australian waters are home to a walking shark? The epaulette shark walks on its paddle-shaped fins both in and out of the water. <\/p>\n
The epaulette shark can also swim to make a fast getaway, but as often as not it gets about by clambering over the seabed. <\/p>\n
It is also an unusual coral-reef shark, because it can survive in warm, oxygen-poor pools at low tide. It conserves oxygen by shutting down its motor nerve system but leaving its sensory nerves alert to detect predators.<\/p>\n
It dilates its blood<\/a> vessels, which lowers its blood pressure by as much as half, and pumps more blood to the brain and the heart itself. With these adaptations it can survive in very-low-oxygen conditions until the tide rises and oxygen-rich water floods its pool once more.<\/p>\n Discover other walking fish<\/a> and weird fish<\/a> – and speaking of walking do you know there’s a walking tree<\/a> – sort of<\/p>\n Read more fascinating shark facts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did you know Australian waters are home to a walking shark? The epaulette shark walks on its paddle-shaped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-569518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}