Now, this is pretty darn weird!
Not only is this shark albino, but it also has ONE properly working eye!
Well… it did.
This baby shark was cut out of it’s dead mother’s womb after she was caught by fisherman in the Gulf of California. It appears the mother was caught legally but was not able to give birth to this guy, or any of his 9 brothers and sisters, before she met her end.
Scientists say this little pup with one eye wouldn’t have stood a chance in the wild but, I would have liked to hear he at least got a try.
Discovery News writes:
The ‘Cyclops shark’ that went viral on the net a few months ago appears to be a legitimate one-eyed dusky shark fetus, according to LiveScience and numerous other media reports.
When photos of the shark first surfaced in the Pisces Fleet Sportfishing blog, at Facebook, and at other high traffic spots, many people thought the images were too bizarre to depict anything legitimate. The cute little bug-eyed individual looks more like a happy cartoon character than a real shark, especially when its mouth is held open.
But National Geographic shares that two scientists from the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico, have studied the specimen and have determined it’s a 22-inch-long dusky shark fetus with a single, functioning eye that’s front and center on its head.
The fetus was discovered after fisherman Enrique Lucero León “legally caught” a pregnant dusky shark near Cerralvo Island in the Gulf of California.
Biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña of the center in La Paz told National Geographic that when León sliced open his catch, he found the odd-looking male embryo along with nine normal siblings. “He said, That’s incredible — wow,” according to Galván-Magaña.
Read more at news.discovery.com