Antarctica's First Filmed Shark Barely Moves at All

In January 2025, a baited deep-sea camera set by the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre settled into a trench off the South Shetland Islands and filmed a sleeper shark, roughly 10 to 13 feet long, gliding past at about 490 meters down. The team believes it is the first time any shark has been filmed in Antarctica's extreme environment — and they say the sighting was genuinely surprising, because they did not think sharks lived in Antarctic waters at all. This episode asks the question that footage opened: what lets a slow, big-bodied swimmer survive down there? To answer it, we follow the evidence out of Antarctica and into the rest of the genus Somniosus. Baited cameras in Suruga Bay, Japan, gave the first measured swimming speed for a Pacific sleeper shark: 0.21 meters per second over the ground, a pace that ranks among the slowest known for a fish of that size. MRI scans of Greenland and Pacific sleeper shark brains show one of the largest olfactory regions described in any shark and a comparatively small visual region, which the scanning team concluded points to a slow predator guided more by smell Chapters: 0:00 A Camera in an Antarctic Trench 1:27 Why Antarctic Sharks Are So Rare 2:08 What a Sleeper Shark Is 2:47 Measuring the Slowest Swimmers 4:05 Brain Scans: Smell Over Sight 4:59 Scavenger, Hunter, or Both 6:02 TMAO and the Chemistry of Cold 6:48 A Thought Experiment: Her Centuries 7:05 What Is Still Unknown 7:44 Pressures on the Greenland Shark Illustrations in this video are interpretive artwork, not photographs or footage. Illustrations are interpretive artwork. Any what-if segment is clearly labeled and is not a scientific claim. 📓 More field notes:    / @whyldwonders   🔔 Subscribe for new episodes:    / @whyldwonders   #WhyldWonders #SpeculativeBiology #WhatIf #SleeperShark #GreenlandShark #Antarctica #DeepSea #MarineBiology