The Insane Biology of: Hammerhead Sharks

[Music] this episode of real science is brought to you by skillshare home to thousands of classes that can teach you a new life skill 550 million years ago the ocean was a simple ecosystem full of reefs made by bacteria and a gooey mat of microbes that covered the ocean floor creatures were simple often amorphous none were yet predatory but within a few million years this simple ecosystem would disappear replaced by an ocean full of diverse mobile and highly effective animals the world's first p

redators emerged during the cambrian explosion 540 million years ago in the form of giant shrimp-like creatures like the anomalocaris which trapped its prey in its mouth lined with hooks or the five-eyed opa-binia which caught its victims using a flexible clawed arm attached to its head soon the first fish emerged the jawless egnatha of which two groups still survived today the lampreys and the hagfish and by 450 million years ago the ocean was populated by the ancestor of what is now the most f

earsome predator of the sea sharks the first modern sharks arrived in the late devonian 370 million years ago taking the iconic shape we know today they were six feet long with a streamlined body five to seven gill slits and dorsal fins soon sharks dominated the oceans the carboniferous era was a period with some of the most unique sharks that ever existed strange species like the stetho canthus a shark with what looks like an anvil on its head the eugenio dantida a shark with a tooth whirl at t

he bottom of its jaw and the falcodus a shark with a long sharp horn on its head but these strange iterations of the shark have long since gone extinct the sharks that prevailed were largely streamlined with a pointed snout large pectoral and dorsal fins and a strong crescent-shaped tail like the great whites or the short fin mako sharks like these have dominated the seas for hundreds of millions of years that is until evolution decided to take a strange turn around 20 million years ago evolutio

n created the newest shark to enter the water arguably the strangest one of them all with a mallet-shaped head full of sensory organs and eyes set on either end the hammerhead is one of the most recognizable and downright bizarre looking animals on the earth their body plan a drastic departure from the other sharks that roam the sea they are found in temperate and tropical waters worldwide and can often be seen in massive numbers as they migrate to colder water up to 6 meters long and weighing u

p to 450 kilograms hammerheads are a formidable and dominant force across the world's oceans why only recently did shark evolution take such a surprising turn making something so different from the rest and what does their odd-shaped head do that gives hammerheads their evolutionary edge [Music] the iconic hammer of the hammerhead shark is called a cephalofoil and the size of it varies from species to species it's easy to assume this weird shape is a rubbery extension of flesh but it's actually

a flattened and stretched out skull the smallest cephalofoil is the modest bonnet head also known as the shovelhead the largest is the winghead shark whose wing-like head is so big its width is nearly 50 percent of its total body length all other hammerheads fall between these two extremes and on the tip of all of the hammerhead cephalofoils are their weird beady eyes this configuration is a little baffling being as spread out as they are it would seem like each eye would see the world independe

ntly with no overlap in each eye's vision not something that would be very helpful for a predator the visible field for all creatures is the expanse of space visible to them without moving their eyes in humans our forward-facing horizontal visual field is around 190 degrees our binocular vision where the vision of each eye overlaps giving us depth perception covers 120 horizontal degrees in fact most predators have large binocular fields to help quickly scan the environment for prey an ability m

ade possible by having eyes that face forward by contrast most prey animals have eyes on the sides of their heads to help them be aware of danger coming from any direction pigeons for example have a visual field of around 310 degrees but a very narrow binocular portion in the front you can see this pattern throughout the animal kingdom prey and predator species distinguishable by eye position but when you look at a hammerhead shark it's not immediately obvious what's going on there they are obvi

ously predators but its eyes are far apart and in a totally unique configuration from all other vertebrates does the weird shape of the hammerhead hurt or help their vision and thus their predatory ability in 2009 researchers started to get to the bottom of it they compared the visual fields of three hammerhead shark species to two sharks with a more typical head morphology to see which type of shark body plan offers a more enhanced binocular field all sharks in the study had a full 360 vertical

visual field with similar vertical binocular overlaps the hammerheads didn't really differ here but when looking at the horizontal visual field the differences were profound the total monocular visual fields ranged from 308 to 340 degrees with the hammerheads on the upper end and when comparing binocular field of view the hammerheads were the clear winners the lemon shark had a mere 10 degrees of binocular overlap the black nose just 11. the modest bonnet head had a bit more with 13 and the sca

lloped hammerhead had 32 degrees of overlap and the winghead shark the one with the widest head had 48 degrees of binocular overlap nearly four times that of the typical sharks it's clear then that the binocular overlaps in hammerheads increases as the width of the head increases this gives them an advantage when hunting for prey by giving them exceptional depth perception out of all the sharks they have the clearest view of the underwater world and it shows hammerheads are some of the most effe

ctive predators among the sharks easily catching and devouring stingrays octopuses and even other sharks this alone may have been enough to influence the evolution of the hammerhead cephalofoil but the long flat shape of the head does more than give the shark better vision it also gives the hammerhead unique hydrodynamics found nowhere else in the animal kingdom when you think of agility and speed in the ocean you think of animals like mako sharks or bottlenose dolphins animals with a streamline

d pointed nose that cuts through the water but a hammerhead shark is basically the opposite of that it's like an airplane with a wing attached to its front hammerheads have to use much more energy than other normal shark species just to swim because of the increased drag it's a lot of work to push that thing around so the obvious question is why would nature do this what benefit does this give to the hammerhead if any elasmobranks like the sharks and rays don't have a swim bladder so they have t

o constantly swim to avoid sinking to the bottom so for a long time it was thought that the cephalofoil indeed acts like a wing producing lift forces that help the hammerhead stay vertically positioned in the water column this theory seems to make sense when you compare the cephalofoil to an airplane wing the hammerhead hammer looks just like one the structure's technical name cephalofoil even means head wing it's easy to assume then that the flow of water over the cephalofoil works just like th

e flow of air over a wing to test this theory researchers laser scanned the heads of eight species of hammerhead each digitized head was then placed in a virtual underwater environment allowing them to measure water pressure drag and flow they then did the same for a few shark species with more typical pointy heads and surprisingly they found that the cephalofoil does not create lift when the shark is swimming in a regular forward motion but when the head is tilted up or down strong forces quick

ly come into play when the angle of attack changes the shark can rapidly ascend or descend the hammer is not for lift but for maneuverability and this type of motion is essential for how the hammerhead hunts unlike mako sharks that chase down prey in long pursuits hammerheads swim just above the sand looking for bottom dwelling prey once detected these prey animals like stingrays or squid will erratically dart away to escape zigzagging up down left right and the hammerhead follows suit supportin

g this hypothesis is the winghead shark who has the biggest head of all the hammerheads compared to its body it has the largest amount of drag but also shows the greatest change in lift as the attack angle changes of all the hammerheads it has the best maneuverability and when you look at its diet you can see why evolution would create something so extreme most hammerheads eat crabs or stingrays creatures that are quick but not known for their sheer agility but the wing head diet consists of abo

ut 93 teleost fishes like herrings which are very fast and very agile the cephalofoil gives the hammerheads an agility unmatched in the world of sharks allowing them to fill an ecological niche that other sharks cannot but on top of this agility hammerheads possess a sixth sense something which we have no equivalent to their ability to detect minute and invisible electric fields in the water [Music] the underwater world for us is distorted our vision blurred our hearing muffled we can immediatel

y tell that the ocean is not where we belong but on top of our senses becoming out of whack there is so much more going on under the waves than we could ever perceive a world of stimuli that we can't pick up on at all a world of electricity electroreception is a sixth sense to many aquatic creatures it's an ability to detect the electrical fields that permeate the water giving navigational cues and information about the location of prey in fact it's observed almost exclusively in aquatic animals

since water is a much better conductor of electricity than air many members of the elasmobrank fish family share this trait but shark's electro-reception abilities are the most finely tuned sharks receive tiny electrical signals from their environment via a series of pores peppered over their heads these pores are distributed in discrete patterns varying somewhat among the elasmobrank species in this picture of a great white shark you can see the clusters of pores around its eyes and nostrils t

hese pores are filled with an electrically conductive jelly and lead to tiny bulbous cells called ampolae of lorenzini and this is the key to their amazing power all animals generate electricity around them as their muscles contract in movement and their heartbeats and this current radiates away from them in the water when these electrical currents travel towards the shark and through the jelly they stimulate cilia hair-like projections on the amplia which then trigger the sensory neurons this t

hen triggers neurotransmitters in the shark's brains which tells them they are close to something alive this sense works even when the conditions underwater render the five other common senses sight smell taste touch and hearing useless it works in turbulent water in total darkness and even when prey are hidden beneath the sand and for the hammerheads this sense is even more extreme with a wider head hammerheads have a greater number of electrosensory pores the pores are also located over a broa

der area which increases the surface area that the head can sample and thus increases the probability of a prey encounter so when the hammerhead swims above the sand it waves its head like a metal detector looking for treasure its treasure being a buried stingray and the sensitivity of this metal detector head is profound researchers found that newborn bonnethead sharks can detect electric fields less than one nanovolt per square centimeter this is around the equivalent to the intensity of a vol

tage gradient that would be created in the sea by connecting one end of a 1.5 volt double a battery to the long island sound and the other end in the waters off of florida theoretically a shark swimming between these places could tell when the battery was switched on or off such incredible electrical sensitivity is over 5 million times greater than anything we could ever feel even our best technology struggles to detect something that minute and it's likely the most powerful electrical sensing i

n the animal kingdom we often think of the weirdest cartoonist animals being things of the past creatures that were giant strange or sinister but hammerheads show us that evolution is never finished what seems illogical or even detrimental to an animal's survival can be the key to them fitting into a very specific environmental niche what else will appear on earth in the next 50 or 100 million years what will sharks look like given that much time some reef shark species have recently evolved the

ability to walk even above the water at low tide other species have recently been discovered to glow in the dark others can live in fresh water in addition to salt water what else does the future hold for sharks like the hammerheads it's hard to speculate but the possibilities are endless sharks have dominated the seas since the end cretaceous and as a group have survived all five mass extinctions so far in large part due to their ability to fill many varying ecological niches but the hammerhea

ds as the newest species of shark have not yet faced such an event that is until now many believe we're currently living through the sixth mass extinction due to human activity and sharks especially the hammerheads are among the most at risk one study in australia reported that 80 of scalloped hammerheads have been lost they're threatened by commercial fishing mainly for the shark fin trade where the fins are cut off and the rest of the body is discarded their numbers like many sharks are dwindl

ing and if we as a species aren't careful we may never get to see what the future holds for such incredible creatures being able to talk about the science and conservation subjects near and dear to my heart on a platform with such a wide audience is something i once could only have dreamed about after finishing college i knew that science communication was my passion i just needed to find a way to make that my career working with real engineering and then starting this channel made that dream a

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t the first thousand people to sign up with the link in the description we'll get a free trial of skillshare premium so you can dive into classes about video editing animation or graphic design all skills that are super useful for making videos there's no risk in trying it out and getting your creativity flowing or getting that idea you've had forever finally off the ground [Music] you