This beautiful shark might cost me my search engine ranking! That’s because I have to say Google is wrong when it comes to this species of shark! But it’s all just language…
On picmybug I do not professionally identify the animals I saw. You know that. The first thing I do with a picture is to compare it to similar animals on Google. The shark that took me 12 years of diving to find one, is clearly a leopard shark. Everyone in the Maldives would agree. Google does. It shoes exactly the shark I saw. ID done.
Triakis semifasciatus. Just to confirm the ID, I checked iNaturalist for the distribution. West coast of the United States. What? Maldives weren’t even mentioned. Fishbase says the same. The leopard shark does not live in the Indian ocean? But I saw it. What went wrong? Language. Common name confusion. And Google makes a mistake too. It shows us two different species under the name leopard shark. It’s not unusual to have the same common name for different animals, but even under the scientific name Triakis semifasciatus it will show two very different looking sharks. Very confusing! There are some stock images with wrong labels, and some websites as well. It’s the first time I found so obviously wrong labelled images on Google.
In fact I saw a zebra shark, which in German is also called Leopardenhai. Or Zebrahai. I guess leopard shark just sounds better and thus is the commonly used name. To add more confusion, Johann Reinhold Förster named it in 1781 Squalus tigrinus – Tiger shark! Our shark has many very different names. Fishbase lists 120 common names for the shark that is currently called Stegostoma tigrinum. Scientific names are so much more precise. But don’t get me wrong, naming an animal comes with many challenges. There are 12 synonyms for our shark, and at least 17 zoologist were involved over the last 266 years.
T. semifasciatus, the other leopard shark, is a houndshark (!), and has broad bands or saddles instead of small dots as an adult. It shares one order with catsharks and weaselsharks. Not to confuse with dogfish or dogsharks… My takeaway from the zebra shark is this.
We like to compare new observations to things we already know. It’s a energy saving shortcut for our brain, used to categorize new things. The shark has stripes like a tiger. Or zebra. As a juvenile. To be honest I find a juvenile zebra shark looks like a real leopard shark (the T. semifasciatus), which conveniently doesn’t seem to change it’s appearance with age.
The adult zebra shark has patches like a leopard. Wait no. Actually more like a cheetah, with solid dark patches. Leopard and jaguar have darker patches surrounded by solid spots. That’s actually what a juvenile zebra shark looks like. It changes with age, first they have solid black bands like a tiger or zebra. This is also not entirely true, I see a black baby shark with white lines. Anyways. When these black bands fade, the dots appear, and during the transition, it’s a jaguar or leopard shark. So with age Stegostoma tigrinum, the tiger shark, goes from a tiger/ zebra over to a leopard/ jaguar to a cheetah look.
More like a zebra looks the juvenile banded catshark Chiloscyllium punctatum. Punctatum means dotted though. Not banded. Language!
If you want a proper leopard shark, look for Poroderma pantherinum, the leopard catshark. It even has the relation to leopard in its scientific name, plus the right pattern.
Stegostoma tigrinum is a carpet shark (order Orectolobiformes). It is possibly the closest living relative of the whaleshark. They might grow up to 2m size, but I think the ones I saw were maybe 1.5m. Johann Reinhold Förster, a German naturalist, described it as Squalus tigrinus in 1781. He was the naturalist on the Second Voyage of James Cook from 1772 to 1775. There’s a story around the naturalist Joseph Banks and a poop deck on the HMS Adventure. Banks didn’t like the vessel and thus Förster joined the voyage. And that’s another language issue. A poop deck is not what you might think, it’s just the top deck in the stern of a boat…
We watched this shark hunting right in front of us. The shark formed kind of a basket around small rock, using his pectoral fins, and then the whole shark quivered to get fish out of their hides. He caught two groupers with the described method. An unforgettable experience!
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