I always thought the six gilled chinarks stayed deep, like over 300' deep. Maybe not?

Could've been a six gill shark. They get up to 200 lbs or so.

Could've been a six gill shark. They get up to 200 lbs or so.

Maybe they were six gill pups? In fact my dad's bro from MN brought two back to the house once. Why? Who knows. But definitely grey and not even close to being a dog fish.

"It sorta bumped (hard) off of my chest"

It was marking you. He made you his.....


Mudshark legend:

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/mudshark.asp

They finally found out why the sixgills are in the puget sound glad to know why now .........................................




For years, scientists have been baffled by sightings of the sixgill shark in Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle. The heavy-bodied sharks, which reach up to 13 feet in length, are found worldwide at the bottom of the ocean. But scientists couldn't understand why the sharks inhabited the waters of Elliot Bay and Puget Sound.

"The presence of the shark here in Elliot Bay and Puget Sound was kind of a little-known secret among scientists, commercial fishermen, and maybe local scuba divers, and the reason it's here is part of the big mystery," said Jeff Chrstiansen, a senior biologist with the Seattle Aquarium.

One reason, it turns out, is that the prehistoric-looking shark knows something about family.

Don't forget to tune in to Shark Week, starting Aug. 1 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the Discovery Channel.

By setting up a genetic tagging station in the Sound, researchers with the aquarium, along with help from NOAA and the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, learned that most of the sharks in the area were actually brothers and sisters.

Mother sharks return to Puget Sound to give birth to pups, and then these siblings make a point of sticking together.

"The sweeping majority of the sharks that you're seeing on the video monitors that come into our research events are brothers and sisters out of the same litter," said Chrstiansen. "And it appears that these animals are staying together as a family, not with mom, but as brothers and sisters, hanging out and growing up in loosely associated groups."

Christiansen points out that this is an area of shark research that has gotten little attention.

"What we're interested in is if we can flip this observation around: Are the relationships we're seeing between brothers and sisters traveling together and staying together as juveniles transferable to other shark species as well?" said Christiansen. "We don't know; we'd like to see some effort going into other shark species to see if that's present."

Sixgill sharks are so named since they have six gill slits, unlike most other sharks which have only five. It's also known as the cow shark or mud shark. This primitive species is one of the few surviving members of the Hexanchidae family and is related to today's dogfish and Greenland shark, although it's more closely related to species found only in fossils. Some of the sixgill shark's relatives date back over 200 million years. Females are usually larger than males, reaching lengths of up to 18 feet. Despite their large size and sluggish movement, they are capable of bursts of speed to catch prey.

The sixgill shark family groups in Puget Sound seem to come in waves. Some years there are a lot of them, while in other years, they're almost nonexistent. That's why the aquarium built a research station where the sharks literally come to them. Christiansen explained the aquarium's Sixgill Shark exhibit doubles as the actual research station.

"We switch these cameras from rolling video tape to live mode, and we'll put down a bait attractant to see if we can attract any of the sharks in the local area to come close enough to the very end of our pier -- 60 feet down -- where we can get a chance to put visual marker tags on them and get genetic biopsy tissue samples," explained Christiansen.

A shark cage mounted on the bottom of their station allows them to dive down and examine the animals up close.

Among the questions the team is hoping to answer is how many of the sharks are in the area, what they're doing and what their movement patterns are.

The Seattle Aquarium researchers also want to take their studies to other parts of the world to find out if their findings on family travel among the Puget Sound sharks applies to sixgills in other parts of the world.

"Sixgill Sharks live pretty much wherever the ocean bottom is," said Shawn Larson, a curator at the Seattle Aquarium. "They're known into water hundreds (of feet) to thousands of feet deep; the maximum depth range of the shark really is unknown because we really haven't sampled that much in extremely deep water."

thanks but what im wondering is when the B run of chrome chum hits the NisQually?

When i was a kid, it was more or less a given that fishermen would kill every dogfish they caught. I remember one time when my Dad took a knife and slit open a big dogfish and then cut the line. I saw the the dogfish swim around beneath the boat eating its own guts. Pretty cool. Obviously left an impression on me.

200 pounds is a juvinial ive done research and have found out males get up to 13 feet and females can get up to 18 feet in length they come in to the puget sound to breed and thats it but the younger six gills will stay in the waters till adults and will stay with their siblings as in brothers and sisters untill they mature which is a little over 6 feet in length i have caught and release a six gill pushing 12 feet but as they are protected i could not take it out of the water for a correct measurment...........

What i think took a bite out of your cod was most likely a small salmon shark as a dogfish's jaw is quite dull but i have seen dogfish around the 5 foot range and over 20 pounds at point defiance

...with their siblings as in brothers and sisters...

What i think took a bite out of your cod was most likely a small salmon shark