Whitespotted Bamboo Shark

Fascinating facts about the Whitespotted Bamboo Shark

• At just under a meter long, up to 93 cm (37 in), the whitespotted bamboo shark fits comfortably in a 180-gallon home tank, making it one of the few sharks hobbyists can actually keep.
• When night falls, these bottom-dwelling hunters use electroreceptors on their snouts to sniff out buried prey, then pivot their teeth backward to crush hard-shelled crabs without breaking the tips.
• A single clutch of eggs measures about five inches and stays tucked in the sand for 14-15 weeks before hatching into six-inch juveniles, a timeline that surprised researchers when a female produced offspring without any male contact in 2002.
• The shark’s purple-pink spotted pattern with dark bands is so distinct that marine biologist Ruthie Delaney says it’s the easiest visual cue for identifying any member of its carpet-shark family.
• Albinism is exceedingly rare, estimated at 1 in 10,000 births, but three albino individuals have hatched at SeaWorld Orlando, and Denver’s Downtown Aquarium has been showcasing albino hatchlings every year since 2007.

At a glance

About the Whitespotted Bamboo Shark

The whitespotted bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium plagiosum) glides along Pacific coral reefs, its slender body nearing a metre in length and its skin a tapestry of purple and pink spots framed by dark bands on a stark white canvas. Its dorsal fins boast convex posterior margins, and a unique coloration noted by marine biologist Ruthie Delaney makes it instantly recognizable among carpet sharks. By day it rests on the seabed, propping its head and trunk on bent and depressed pectoral fins, while at night it becomes a stealthy predator, using tiny, medially-crowned teeth to grasp soft fish or pivot them into crushing plates for hard-shelled crabs. Electroreceptors along its snout, ampullae of Lorenzini, detect the faint electric fields of buried prey. A surprising twist in its biology emerged in July 2002 at Detroit’s Belle Isle Aquarium, where a female laid a clutch that hatched without any apparent fertilization, marking the first recorded instance of parthenogenesis in this species. The shark continues its nocturnal forays across waters from Japan to India.

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