This is the only video of a frilled shark on the whole internet but it’s a deep sea animal in the process of dying which is why it swims so weird and its gills are puffed out and its whole front end seems paralyzed. Somewhere there are vibrant happy frilled sharks swimming gracefully like regular sharks but almost no one has ever seen what that’s like.
RE: why this happens: most of the ocean is just one huge open space with no physical barriers, so a deep sea animal relies only on its senses of light, temperature and pressure to tell it where it should stay. As it wears down with age or sickness those senses start to break down so everywhere probably begins to feel the same. It randomly wanders farther out of its habitat and sometimes that wandering takes it up and up and miraculously one of us humans sees it before any predators catch it, which is incredible because that’s hundreds of meters of distance it might have avoided porpoises, seals, barracuda, morays, squid, tuna, marlins, large jellyfish, even scavengers like lobsters and hagfish will often start eating something on the brink but not quite dead yet.
It’s sad, but it’s likely this shark lived a very long life, and it doesn’t know it, but it survived a very long trip in a very vulnerable state just to visit us for a moment. With its senses so far gone it may not have felt too bad. It might have felt like any ordinary day floating around its home until it fell asleep one last time, never knowing how it amazed and enlightened members of an entirely alien species in the process!
Judge Holden DanceCormac McCarthy [Narration: Richard Poe]Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in double-time and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backward and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
