Endangered
Dusky shark
Carcharhinus obscurus
Dusky shark is a shark or ray in the family Carcharhinidae (order Carcharhiniformes) — Carcharhinus obscurus, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
This shark has a slender, streamlined body with a broadly rounded snout no longer than the width of the mouth. The five pairs of gill slits are fairly long. The second dorsal fin is much smaller and is positioned about opposite the anal fin.
Alongside the bull shark, the dusky shark is the largest members of its genus, commonly reaching a length of 3.2 m (10 ft) and a weight of 160–180 kg (350–400 lb). The maximum recorded length and weight are 4.2 m (14 ft) and 372 kg (820 lb) respectively.
Range and habitat
The range of the dusky shark extends worldwide, albeit discontinuously, in tropical and warm-temperate waters. In the western Atlantic Ocean, it is found from Massachusetts and the Georges Bank to southern Brazil, among them the Bahamas and Cuba. In the eastern Atlantic Ocean, it has been reported from the western and central Mediterranean Sea, the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and possibly elsewhere among them Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Madeira.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Populations migrate seasonally towards the poles in the summer and towards the equator in the winter, traveling hundreds to thousands of kilometers. Adult dusky sharks have a broad and varied diet, consisting mostly of bony fishes, sharks and rays, and cephalopods, but also occasionally crustaceans, sea stars, bryozoans, sea turtles, marine mammals, carrion, and humans.
In crisis
A generalist apex predator, the dusky shark can be found from the coast to the outer continental shelf and adjacent pelagic waters, and has been recorded from a depth of 400 m (1,300 ft). Because of its slow reproductive rate, the dusky shark is very vulnerable to human-caused population depletion. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed this species as Endangered worldwide and Vulnerable off the eastern United States, where populations have dropped to 15–20% of 1970s levels.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed this species as Endangered worldwide. The American Fisheries Society has assessed North American dusky shark populations as Vulnerable.
Dusky 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 Dusky shark, Wikidata item Q833586. 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.
