Sunday 7 April 2019

Enormous Great White Shark Pregnant with Record 14 Pups Was Caught and Sold in Taiwan


By Kimberly Hickok, Reference Editor | March 22, 2019 02:52pm ET
A large, female great white shark pregnant with a record 14 pups was accidentally caught by fishers off the coast of Taiwan and sold at a fish market on Wednesday (March 20). The enormous mamma was purchased for less than $2,000 by a Taiwanese taxidermy company, Taiwan English News reported.
The images from local news agencies of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and the pups that were cut out of her are hard to believe. At more than 15 feet long (4.7 meters), the shark is bigger than a small car and is probably not what most fishers want in their nets. The shark's 14 pups look as though they were nearly fully developed and ready to take on the open ocean but were stopped short when their mother was killed.
The 14 pups this mamma shark was carrying likely mark a record number for the species, said David Ebert, a shark scientist and the director of the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Moss Landing, California. "It is very rare to catch pregnant white sharks, so at least they were able to document this with photographs," Ebert told Live Science in an email. 



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