Carpet sharks range from a 30-centimetre bottom dweller to the whale shark
The biggest fish on Earth and a shark small enough to hold in two hands belong to the same order. Carpet sharks take their name from the intricate patterns many of them wear, markings that let them vanish against the seabed, yet the family's giant, the whale shark, feeds on plankton.
Carpet sharks form the order Orectolobiformes, a small group of around 43 species in seven families. They share a set of features: five gill slits, two dorsal fins without spines, and a short mouth that does not reach past the eyes. Many have barbels, whisker-like touch organs near the nostrils, and grooves linking nostrils to mouth. The order goes back to the Early Jurassic, with the oldest known genera found in Belgium, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
Sizes vary enormously. The whale shark reaches somewhere between 14 and nearly 19 metres, making it the largest fish alive, but it is harmless to people, straining plankton from the water drawn through its wide mouth. At the other extreme, the barbelthroat carpet shark grows to only about 30 centimetres and has barbels hanging from its throat. In between come nurse sharks, bamboo sharks and the flamboyantly marked zebra and epaulette sharks.
Most carpet sharks hunt along the bottom in shallow to moderately deep water, picking up molluscs, crustaceans and other small animals. Wobbegongs, flattened and fringed, are the ambushers of the group, lying camouflaged until prey drifts close; one was seen swallowing a bamboo shark whole.
Reproduction takes two routes. Some species lay eggs, either loose in the water or wrapped in tough cases that females may push into crevices for protection. Others keep fertilised eggs inside the body, where the few embryos first live on yolk and then on nourishing secretions from the mother, emerging well developed and ready to fend for themselves. Carpet sharks occur in every ocean but are most common in the tropical and temperate western Indo-Pacific.
Source: Carpet shark
