Imagine this: You’re a rig shark. Not a great white. Not even a hammerhead. You’re barely five feet long, named like a piece of industrial equipment, and your daily goals include not being eaten and possibly finding a decent crustacean snack. Life isn’t exactly “Shark Week” glam.
Now imagine, in the middle of your existentially quiet, gravel-sifting day, you’re scooped up by some excitable humans in lab coats and plopped into a tank. And what do you do? You click. Yes, click. Not with a mouse. With your mouth.
“Click, click, click,” goes the rig shark.
This isn’t the plot of a rejected Pixar movie, though one would fund it immediately. It’s real science, courtesy of Carolin Nieder and her team at the University of Auckland (with a detour to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, because science needs passport stamps too). In a study published in the delightfully named Royal Society Open Science, these researchers confirmed what no one expected: sharks — at least this one — can make noise.
Let’s rewind a bit. For decades, we were told sharks are silent killers. That’s half the thrill of Jaws, right? The menace emerges from the deep without warning. Cue ominous strings. CHOMP. No screaming, no thrashing, no aquatic chatter. Just the clean, sterile horror of death by cartilage. Spielberg built a franchise — and a collective ocean phobia — on the silence.
And now? This scrappy little rig shark has clicked its way into scientific literature and rewired our assumptions.
But here’s the kicker: the shark’s clicks may not be some deep, interspecies Morse code. Nieder suggests it could be the sound of teeth snapping under stress. In human terms, this would be the equivalent of someone grabbing you unexpectedly and you responding with the panicked clack of your jaw involuntarily mimicking a wind-up toy. Still, that’s something.
Until now, sharks have been largely left out of the fishy band because they lack a swim bladder — that versatile organ responsible for both buoyancy and bass drops in other fish. So it was widely assumed they had nothing to say. But maybe we weren’t listening. Or maybe rig sharks are just built different.
And this changes the game. Because once you have one shark clicking, who’s to say there aren’t others beatboxing underwater or holding angry debates about plastic pollution? Are we one GoPro dive away from discovering the deep-sea equivalent of a TED Talk delivered by a mako?
Nieder, who spent years focused on how sharks hear, didn’t expect to be the one to hear from them. That’s the magic of science — you go looking for silence and stumble into a spark of noise. A soft, staccato “click,” like a battery trying to start, or a tap on a fishy microphone.
It’s oddly poetic, isn’t it? That we mythologized sharks into silent, stalking death machines, when the truth might be that they’re sensitive, stressed-out little guys just trying to say something before getting eaten by a larger cousin or served as soup.
So the next time someone plays the Jaws theme and jokes about going for a swim, remember: that music was a lie. The shark didn’t sneak up in silence. It clicked. Anxiously. Possibly adorably.
And all this time, we just didn’t have our ears on.
Click, click, click.