Rare megamouth shark caught and dissected in front of onlookers in Japan

Fishermen off the coast of Japan hauled in a rare catch this week: a megamouth shark. It's only the 58th time in history that the species has been documented. Megamouths spend most of the time eating shrimp-like krill in the deep dark depths of the ocean, only rising to the surface at night. Fishermen estimate that the 1,500-pound, 13-foot-long shark was hauled up from about 2,600 feet. Before being taken away and preserved at the Marine Science Museum in Shizuoka City, the specimen was publicly dissected -- more than 1,000 onlookers watched as the creature was sliced open. Though sightings of the species are rare, several dozen other specimens have been caught over the years and housed in museums around the world. In addition to the 13 megamouths that have been caught in Japanese waters through the years, encounters with the strange shark have been documented in California, Taiwan, Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador, Senegal, South Africa, Mexico and Australia. "As with the two other filter-feeding sharks, the basking and whale sharks, this species is wide-ranging," the website of the Shizuoka City marine museum claims. "However, the megamouth is considered to be less active and a poorer swimmer than the basking or whale sharks."