Gill Rakers in the Megamouth Shark Function Like Biological Sieves

Inside this shark’s throat sits a filtration system finer than kitchen strainers.

Top Ad Slot
🤯 Did You Know (click to read)

Basking sharks also use elongated gill rakers to strain plankton from seawater.

The megamouth shark possesses specialized gill rakers that trap plankton while allowing seawater to exit through the gill slits. These structures act as a living sieve, enabling efficient filter feeding despite the shark’s enormous size.

Mid-Content Ad Slot
💥 Impact (click to read)

Each feeding pass filters thousands of liters of water, concentrating microscopic prey into digestible biomass. The scale mismatch between body mass and prey size becomes possible only through continuous, high-volume filtration.

This anatomical innovation parallels the baleen plates of whales, showing that distant evolutionary lineages independently engineered near-identical solutions to exploit plankton-rich ocean layers.

Source

Smithsonian Ocean Portal

LinkedIn Reddit

⚡ Ready for another mind-blower?

‹ Previous Next ›

💬 Comments