Watch: How to spot a napping shark (and a sonogram of a pregnant tiger shark's babies in the womb)
Discovery Channel claims it has the first ever documented footage of a napping shark and a pregnant one.
Sharks, those much maligned predators, also have babies and nap much like the rest of the animal kingdom. A Great White shark named Emma is seen in the video above catching some shut-eye, even if not literally. The shark’s slack jaw suggests that she is napping.
“Facing into the current, with her mouth open, oxygen rich water flows over Emma’s gills, it allows her to slow down and save energy for her hunting during the day. But she can never stop swimming completely or she’ll sink to the bottom, suffocate and die,” the narrator tell us.
The video, posted by The Discovery Channel, is part of the annual Shark Week programming. The footage was recorded using a robot submersible.
In the video below, a pregnant tiger shark gets a sonogram, revealing at least “20 tiger shark pups”. While you may have heard or read stories of shark pups devouring each other in the womb, this does not apply to all species. Tiger sharks with two uteri can have a litter ranging from 10-80 pups.