Imagine you're aboard the Navy ship AFB-14 , sailing off the coast of Kaneohe, Hawaii. The date is November 15, 1976. The anchors are about to be pulled aboard when you see something caught in the middle of the bright orange, parachute-like device.
It's a shark, and a pretty big one at that.
Meet the greatmouth shark ( Megachasma pelagios ). These fish can grow very large—though not as impressively large as, say, a whale shark or a basking shark.
Greatmouths can reach nearly 20 feet (about 6 meters) in length.
It's impressive that these alien-looking sharks have managed to remain hidden for so long. Most of the enormous deep-sea creatures such as sperm whales, oarfish, giant and colossal squid, etc., have long been known to scientists, albeit not very well. Carcasses have washed ashore, specimens have been caught in nets, and, in the case of the sperm whale, we've hunted them for thousands of years.
It's not even that largemouths are super-smart and sneaky. They're relatively slow swimmers, even in deeper waters, and mostly just drift through the water column, sifting plankton from the sea into their cavernous jaws. Their bodies are flaccid and fragile, so much so that sperm whales bounce them around, at least in one case. Sperm whales are a bit of a jerk. You'd expect such a weak swimmer to be washed ashore all the time, but no. As of 2018, fewer than 99 largemouths have been recorded, most of which are carcasses that washed ashore or got caught in nets.
Largemouths have been mistaken for small whales on numerous occasions. Given the vastness of their habitat, one has to wonder if they were perhaps the basis behind the legend of the Ningen . The Ningen is a popular cryptid as old as the internet, described as a pale, humanoid creature that is absolutely enormous.
Hmmm...
Ningen or not, largemouths are very, very large and, relatively speaking, only recently discovered.