A group of young divers enjoyed an encounter with a rarely seen prickly shark at La Jolla Cove, sharks that typically inhabit extremely deep Pacific waters.<\/p>\n
SAN DIEGO \u2014 The La Jolla coast is home to a wide array of aquatic life, but a group of divers was surprised when they came face-to-face with a rarely seen deep-water shark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0“I was like, this is probably going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I just had,” Cali Lingle, a marine biology graduate student at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lingle and three others went for a night dive at La Jolla Cove last week and captured video of the shark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0“It was just checking us out. It turned around and just looked at us a few times. It was probably confused by our light,” Lingle said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group, including Liam Dougherty, an avid recreational diver, estimated the shark to be at least 7 feet long.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I was terrified. I’m terrified of sharks,” Dougherty said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dougherty filmed footage of the shark. The next day, the group showed the video to researchers at Scripps, who confirmed the divers had encountered a prickly shark, also known as Echinorhinus cookei, a creature rarely seen by humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prickly sharks are bottom dwellers in the Pacific Ocean, typically living 300 to more than 2,000 feet deep in colder water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So here, since our water temperature’s a little warmer, it’s unusual to see the shark as shallow as the divers did,” Zach Merson, a Scripps PhD student who studies sharks, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Merson told CBS 8 that the sighting is not a cause for concern.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Here in La Jolla, we have a submarine canyon. So, we have a really deep habitat right next to a really shallow habitat. So, it’s not surprising at all that prickly sharks will come up sometimes to look for food in that shallower habitat,” Merson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their diet includes fish, squid, octopus and other sharks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prickly sharks are non-aggressive to humans, but they are wild animals, so Merson advises that if one does have a close encounter with any shark, keep a distance and be respectful of the creatures.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of young divers enjoyed an encounter with a rarely seen prickly shark at La Jolla Cove,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-465160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}