Cookiecutter Shark

What is Cookiecutter Shark

The cookiecutter shark gets its name because of the feeding habit of gouging round plugs as like the cookie cutter from the larger animals. The species of shark is known for the travel in schools or groups.

Cookiecutter Shark Characteristics

What does Cookiecutter shark look like?

The cookiecutter shark has the elongated cigar-shaped body with a short, bulbously rounded snout. The nostrils have a very short flap of skin front of their head. It has the large oval green eyes are placed forward on the head. They have the large spiracles, positioned on the upper surface of the head. They have the short mouth.

Cookiecutter Shark Facts

• A cookiecutter shark length can reach up to 16.5 to 22 inches long. Females are larger than males.
• The shark has the grayish brown body with dark brown throat while the underparts will be of light color.
• The cookiecutter shark has long, thin body with short cone-shaped snout and larger eyes.
• Cookiecutter shark is extremely fast which has triangular shaped teeth in the lower jaw.
• These sharks periodically lose and swallow the entire row of the teeth from the lower jaw.
• The cookiecutter shark has light emitting organs inside their body which called the photophores.
• The cookie-cutter able to emits light up to 3 hours even after death.
• The feeding time of the cookie cutter is the night.
• It is carnivorous and diet based on the large chunks of flesh removed from the body of large mammals and fish.

Cookiecutter Shark Attack

Though these are true oceanic sharks and rarely seen species of the sharks. But there are few attacks are documented on humans which apparently caused by cookiecutter sharks. The attacks did not do any serious damage of death but it cut down the body and the sign of bites can easily be seen on the skin.

Cookiecutter Shark Life Span

Cookiecutter Shark Diet

The shark is known for consuming every type of medium and large oceanic animal that inhabits with the cookiecutter sharks. The bite scars have been found on cetaceans, pinnipeds, stingrays, and bony fishes. The cookecutter sharks also hunt for the squids and able to eat entirely in once if size ranges from 15 -30 cm.

Cookiecutter Shark Size

The maximum recorded size of this species is about 42 cm for males and 56 cm for females. The most of the species of cookiecutter remain below this length. This is the species about which researchers have very little information as these inhabit the deep water of the ocean.

Baby Cookiecutter Shark

the cookiecutter shark is aplacental viviparous similar to the dogfish sharks with the yolk continuous sustained developing embryos until birth. Females have two functional uteri which can give birth to litters of 6 – 12 pups. A length of the cookieshark at the time of birth noted 12.4 – 13.7 cm long. They carried a long gestation period.

Cookiecutter Shark Habitat

The mainly inhabits in the world’s major tropical and warm temperate oceanic basins. It spends the most of the day at a depth of 1 – 3.7 km and during the time of night, they just go below 85 m. but in the rare cases, it venturing to the water surface. There is no proof for the night segregation.

Cookiecutter Shark Reproduction

The species is mostly found near to the warm water and tropical water. The males get the mating maturity at the length of 36 cm while females take 39 cm to be mature. The mating process or courtship is believed to the similar as other species of the sharks. The females go through a long gestation time.