A deep-sea camera lowered into Antarctica\u2019s Southern Ocean has captured a shark in Antarctic waters for the first time on video. Oceanographer Jessica Kolbusz, working with theMinderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia, said, \u201cIt was surprising since this is the first footage obtained of a Somniosidae or any elasmobranch in situ in the Southern Ocean.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Somniosidae refers to sleeper sharks, and \u201celasmobranch\u201d is the broader group that includes sharks, rays, and skates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How does a shark end up where many people assume sharks simply do not live? Deep-sea<\/a> researcher Alan Jamieson said, \u201cWe went down there not expecting to see sharks because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t get sharks in Antarctica,\u201d adding, \u201cThese things are tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The animal appeared near the South Shetland Islands, roughly 75 miles north of the Antarctic Peninsula<\/a>, in a region that is remote even by polar standards. It was spotted at a depth of about 1,608 feet, and the moment was later found buried inside roughly 400 hours of recorded video. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the footage, the shark looks roughly 10 to 13 feet long and swims through water around 36 degrees Fahrenheit, hinting that large animals may have been living there unnoticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that depth, the world can look empty at first glance. It is dark, cold, and under intense pressure, and even basic tasks like keeping a camera running become an engineering problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One clue may be the \u201clayer cake\u201d structure of the Southern Ocean, with bands of water stacked on top of each other. Some researchers say the warmest layer can sit deeper down, creating a slightly less frigid corridor that could help a shark survive farther south than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The video suggests the animal is a sleeper shark, part of a deep-water family known for slow movement and energy-saving behavior. These sharks<\/a> tend to drift, scavenge when they can, and tolerate conditions that would stress many other fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their most famous relative is the Greenland shark, a species whose age stunned researchers when scientists used radiocarbon dating on eye tissue, a technique that uses radioactive carbon to estimate age. A 2016 study in Science<\/em><\/a> estimated lifespans of at least 272 years, making it one of the longest-lived vertebrates ever studied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Antarctic visitor is thought to be the southern sleeper shark, likely Somniosus antarcticus<\/em>, a deepwater species tied to the wider Southern Ocean, though its day-to-day life is still poorly documented. A 2023 Australian government report <\/a>card describes it as widespread across southern waters and mostly caught as bycatch, which is an accidental catch in deepwater fisheries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sighting came from a baited camera \u201clander,\u201d a rugged camera system lowered to the seafloor<\/a>, left to record, then hauled back up. If that sounds like a trail camera for the ocean, that is not a bad comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This approach has already paid off for the same research group in other extreme places. In January 2025, that university published footage from the Tonga Trench<\/a> that captured another sleeper shark at great depth, underscoring how rarely these animals are seen alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere the shark showed up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Read More: What appeared to be an old, forgotten file from the Magellan probe, launched in 1990, has turned out to reveal one of the strangest discoveries about Venus: an empty underground tunnel approximately 1 kilometer wide<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
What makes a sleeper shark different<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How the team filmed it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n