Looking to impress at your Shark Week viewing party? Stock piling knowledge for Tuesday Trivia? Drawn to Selachii and you don’t know why? Thanks to DISCOVERY, you can study up on sharks to your heart’s content. And…we won’t insult your intelligence by calling these shark fun facts “fin facts.”
Find even more chilling and fascinating shark content during Shark Week, starting July 23. Explore our handy Shark Week Watch Guide to learn more.
Fun Shark Facts
- While many people consider sharks to be the world’s deadliest animal, you are more likely to be killed by hornets, wasps, bees, or dogs.
- Be glad you’re not a shark, moms! The gestation period for a pregnant female shark can range from five months to two years.
- Though, every once in a while, a female shark can reproduce without any contact with a male. This act is known as parthenogenesis.
- Sharks can generate up to 40,000 pounds per square inch of pressure in a single bite. That’s easily enough to chomp off a limb.
- 6 years before Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Burt Reynolds starred in Shark. Real sharks were used in filming, and a stuntman was actually killed.
- Sharks have only two blind spots: one in front of the snout and the other directly behind the head.
- A great white shark rolls its eyes into the back of its head when it attacks to protect its eyes from debris and the thrashing of its prey.
- Sharks can use heartbeats to track their prey. They have electricity-sensing nodules on their noses called ampullae of Lorenzini.
- Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island inspired the fictional town of Amity Island in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jaws.
- Unlike humans, whose upper jaw is a fixed part of the skull, sharks can dislocate and protrude their upper jaw to grab and hang onto prey.
- Great white sharks are picky eaters and can determine after one bite whether or not the meal will satisfy their nutritional needs.
- Whale sharks are much larger than the average shark but are friendly filter feeders who use their rows of teeth to eat plankton, not humans.
- The whale shark’s mouth stretches up to 4.5 feet wide, the largest mouth of all shark species.
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