As Morski writes on the 19th of October, 2019, an experienced fisherman called Ivo Palčić from Proboj on the island of Pag saw a rather strange type of shark get caught up in his fishing net.
Oxynotus centrina, or better to say the Angular roughshark, is a very odd looking resident of the deep sea, usually found living between 100 and 600 metres below the surface. It is indeed rarely caught, as no fisherman would hunt it on purpose, and it rarely swims into the shallows where fish that are typically caught would be. It is a protected species and luckily, this unfortunate shark survived; Palčić immediately freed the strange animal from the net and put it straight back into the sea, seemingly unharmed.
”It was caught in the trawler, I don’t know the exact position it got caught in, as I’d been pulling the net for seven hours, which covers an area of about 18 nautical miles. It was on the lower side of the island of Pag, at 75 metres deep. He was a little stunned, I guess, by the silt, but he survived because when I let him go, he slowly began to move deeper into the sea. I’ve never seen one before, and I have been trawling for 38 years,” Ivo Palčić from Pag told Morski.
The experienced fisherman has had numerous meetings with odd creatures, and this is not his first unusual catch.
”I have happened to catch some unusual species here and there,” said the Pag fisherman.
The shark (Oxynotus centrina) is a species that takes a long time to reach sexual maturity and is therefore susceptible to fishing, despite the fact that it is still thankfully rarely involved in accidental catches. In some countries, the adjective “rough” is also used in their name because of its skin that looks just like sandpaper.
While they do live in the Adriatic sea, they’re very rarely seen and little is known about them or their regular lives in Croatian waters. Take a look at the specimen captured by the fisherman from Pag in the video below:
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