Endangered
Bramble shark
Echinorhinus brucus
Bramble shark is a shark or ray in the family Echinorhinidae (order Squaliformes) — Echinorhinus brucus, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The snout is blunt and shorter than the width of the mouth, with widely spaced nostrils that are preceded by small flaps of skin. Live specimens have greenish coloured eyes. There are five pairs of gill slits, with the fifth pair the longest.
The dorsal fins are spineless and are set less than a fin length's apart from one another. The dermal denticles are scattered irregularly over the body and vary greatly in size, measuring up to 1.5 cm (0.59 in) across.
Range and habitat
Records of the bramble shark are fairly rare and originate from widely scattered locations in tropical and temperate waters worldwide, save for the eastern Pacific Ocean. Most have come from the eastern Atlantic and western Indian Oceans, where its range extends from the North Sea and the British Isles to southern Mozambique, among them the Mediterranean Sea. Found close to the sea floor, the bramble shark most commonly inhabits continental and insular shelves and slopes at depths of 400–900 m (1,300–3,000 ft).
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The large size of its pharynx, relative to its mouth, suggests that it may capture prey by suction. The diet of the bramble shark includes smaller sharks, bony fishes, and crabs, that this slow-moving species may capture via suction.
In crisis
Harmless to humans, it is an occasional bycatch of commercial and recreational fishers, and may be used for fishmeal and liver oil. Its population has declined substantially in the northeastern Atlantic since the 18th and 19th centuries, likely because of overfishing.
Bramble shark is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Bramble shark, Wikidata item Q1297550. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
