First-ever Antarctic sleeper shark footage reveals a giant ‘hunk’ in icy depths
Filmed at 490-metre depth, the sighting challenges beliefs about shark habitats in the Southern Ocean
An ungainly barrel of a shark cruising languidly over a barren seabed far too deep for the sun’s rays to illuminate was an unexpected sight.
Many experts had thought sharks did not exist in the frigid waters of Antarctica before this sleeper shark lumbered warily and briefly into the spotlight of a video camera, researcher Alan Jamieson said this week. The shark, filmed in January 2025, was a substantial specimen with an estimated length of between three and four metres (10 and 13 feet).
“We went down there not expecting to see sharks because there’s a general rule of thumb that you don’t get sharks in Antarctica,” Jamieson said.
“And it’s not even a little one either. It’s a hunk of a shark. These things are tanks,” he added.
The camera operated by the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, which investigates life in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, was positioned off the South Shetland Islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. That is well inside the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, which is defined as below the 60-degree south latitude line.
The centre on Wednesday gave Associated Press permission to publish the images.