Cookie Monster
⚠️Warning! This page contains dead specimens and wounds which may be disturbing!⚠️
You may already know this, but fish don't have hands. That fact won't save you. There's something out there. Something just out of sight. Something waiting in the deep blue darkness. It's waiting to grab you.
This is the Cookiecutter Shark. What an adorable name! That cute name has a really dark connotation. The Cookiecutter is considered a parasite because it does not consume or even kill their prey. They're about 16-20 inches long and they target animals massively larger than them.
They swim up to prey and use their fleshy lips to create suction and latch on. Once they're on they spin, using their lower teeth like a serrated knife, carving out a perfectly circular lump of flesh to eat. This odd eating style requires they have all their teeth at the same time. Their bottom row of teeth is fused after growing into place and when they fall out, they all fall out at once in a big mono-tooth! Their fleshy diet doesn't include many ingredients to make new teeth, so they will swallow their mega-mono-tooth and use it again. Of course that means there's times they can't bite anyone and they just get to be cute and hungry.
There are two species of cookie cutter shark, one with big teeth and one with small teeth. By 2019, we had only collected 10 specimens of the Largetooth Cookiecutter Shark. We find the Small tooth seemingly all the time in bycatch.
They played quite a big role in the Cold War. On the American side, they disabled in part or in whole 30 submarines! They cut oil lines and electrical cables. They damaged sonar and communication equipment. I think they just liked chewing rubber! We can't know how they affected the Soviets, because they won't say!
Just like all secret agents, they glow! These sharks are counter-shaded. They faintly glow from the bottom the same color as would be filtering down from the surface to hide from both predators and prey down below.
They're also called cigar sharks because of their funny shape and collar!
⚠️Now I'm serious! I'm going to show some cookiecutter shark wounds on some rather charismatic animals. If you continue down, you gotta be cool.⚠️
This tuna is a perfect example of a cookiecutter victim. You'll notice there's no bone or organ taken out, just flesh. Perfect, cookie cutter type punch marks of flesh! The cookiecutter doesn't actually need its prey to stay alive like some other parasites. It dines and dashes! I'm going to try and convince you this is a good thing.
This is Peppermint, a young male elephant seal who was malnourished and weak. Cookiecutters got ahold of him and then did the Pacific Marine Mammal Center. The wounds are deep, but not fatal. Peppermint was hurt but his big problem was he hadn't been eating.
I snagged this screenshot off a facebook video of Peppermint being released back out to the beach he was found two months later all fat and happy. The Cookiecutter's bites hurt, but they heal. Peppermint is actually lucky he didn't get bit by any other shark! There's not many things that will just eat you for a moment before you part ways.
As much credit as I give it, I'm terrified of this thing! I don't ever want to be attacked by this living melon baller. Other sharks will bite you and spit you out if they don't like you. This thing rushes in and scoops you before it knows anything! DON'T SCOOP ME! Sometimes I follow a mosquito after it bites me to make sure no brood are birthed from my blood. I'd feel so helpless if a chunk of my calf just went away like this. This might be the animal I'm most scared of in the ocean and talking about it makes it worse actually! I do commend it. This is the best, most moral way to do parasitism, maybe even predation. They don't kill and they don't linger so that's in their favor. I don't know, this might be a little high.