Something is lurking in the deep off the shore of BC but it's not what you think
A rare sighting off the shore of BC has us humming a familiar tune, but don’t worry; this predator encounter doesn’t end nearly as graphically as Jaws, and it’s more gorgeous than gory, in our opinion.
“It came up, and it swam right between my legs, and it was going all around us,” said Mitchell Hewitt to Daily Hive after he and two other lucky scuba divers shared in a rare shark encounter in the waters near Squamish. While it might look like a great white shark to some of us, the animal is actually a bluntnose sixgill shark, and the photos of it don’t disappoint.
Every day, Hewitt dives into Lions Bay’s Kelvin Grove Beach Park with a group because of the “amazing biodiversity,” Hewitt explained. However, during the summer, the group dives at night to specifically look for the bluntnose sixgill shark.
Hewitt said, “We got lucky,” when Daily Hive asked about the jaw-dropping dive experience on August 8. They weren’t expecting to see anything this riveting, especially so quickly into the dive.
Around 7 pm, the group got into the water and saw a juvenile female bluntnose six-gill shark nearly immediately.
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“It was pretty exciting to see it before we actually were even going to look for it,” Hewitt said.
He noted that he’d seen the shark species once before, but “it was a fleeting sighting.”
“This time, we were actually able to be with the shark for approximately 10 minutes. So it was really nice,” he said. “This was a much more exciting encounter.”
Sharks around Vancouver
Danny Kent, an expert at the Vancouver Aquarium, said the bluntnose sixgill shark sighting is “definitely rare.”
Kent is also an experienced diver, and with more than 35 years of dives in coastal BC and Howe Sound, he said although it’s rare, it’s “not unheard of.”
“I can recall hearing about a handful of sixgill shark sightings in Howe Sound over the last few decades,” he said. “This species is like many fish species on our coast that are not necessarily rare but are rarely seen!”
Courtesy Mitchell Hewitt
Bluntnose sixgill sharks live in most of the oceans “but at depths well beyond those typically reached by recreational SCUBA divers.”
“In much of the world, this species can only be seen using submersibles, but we are fortunate in the Pacific Northwest that they often venture up to depths frequented by divers,” Kent said. “It makes sense that they might be seen in shallower areas more often during night dives as many deep-water species migrate up to shallower depths during the dark of night.”
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According to the expert, “There are a number of places on the BC coast and down into Washington state where bluntnose sixgill sharks were predictably seen for many years in a row.” Those areas include Hornby Island (Flora Islet), Barkley Sound, and even right under the dock at the Seattle Aquarium.
“As far as I know, seeing sixgills in those sites is no longer as predicable as it once,” Kent said.
The expert added he’s even heard of smaller bluntnose sixgill sharks being caught in Southern BC and regurgitating up seal pelts. “They are scavengers and so they might take advantage of the large number of harbour seals pupping in the summer along our coast and the mortalities associated with this,” he explained.
Worried about sharks now?
Connect Images – Legacy/shutterstock
If hearing about shark sightings scares you, Hewitt emphasizes that you don’t have to worry.
Seeing a bluntnose sixgill shark is rare because they swim so deep under the water that swimmers wouldn’t likely encounter one. For example, usually in Howe Sound, the bluntnose sixgill shark would be closer to the bottom and not even near divers.
At this time of year, smaller shark species could come up towards the shallows, like the Pacific spiny dogfish. “But again, these sharks are only three or four feet long and don’t really bother humans,” Hewitt said.
“I think that people get scared like ‘oh, sharks gonna attack me,’ā¦ [however] these sharks are very docile, and I don’t think that they would even try to harm a person.”