A team working with the OceanXplorers expedition has tagged a sixgill shark in the waters of the Azores, a deep-sea species that human researchers seldom get to observe. The work produced the first tagging of this shark at depth and the first footage of one hunting at night, two milestones for a animal that spends most of its life far below the surface.
The central aim of the effort was to understand how the shark moves through the water column once darkness falls. Sixgill sharks are known to rise from the abyss to feed, but the details of those nightly journeys have largely remained a mystery. By attaching a tag to the animal, the scientists hoped to track its movements over time and connect them with its feeding behavior, offering a clearer picture of how a creature from the deep fits into the wider marine food web.
The Azores, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, provided the setting for the expedition. Its deep waters are considered a promising place to study species that are otherwise difficult to reach, and the footage captured during the dive gives researchers a rare look at a predator in its natural hunting routine. Findings from the tagging are expected to add to the limited body of knowledge on sixgill sharks and on how deep-sea predators feed in the dark.
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