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Why do hammerhead sharks have hammer-shaped heads? – Landon, age 10
The strange looking sharks are called hammerhead sharks. They look like they were grabbed by the eye sockets and stretched out sideways, like a normal shark.
There are advantages to having a hammer-shaped head. How did hammerheads get that way?
I have been studying sharks for over two decades. Some of the questions have surprised me.
sharks with hammer-shaped heads have advantages, according to scientists.
It has to do with sight. It would give you a bigger field of vision if you pointed your eyes in two different directions. You would have a better idea of what was going on with your eyes. It's difficult to tell how far away things are.
The hammerhead sharks have special sense organs that are scattered on the underside of their hammer. Electricity can be detected by these organs.
The pores act like a metal detector to find prey buried under sand on the ocean floor. Hammerheads have more than regular sharks. The closer the sensory organs are to each other, the better they are at locating food.
Scientists believe hammers help sharks swim faster. You know how powerful large surfaces can be if you have ever walked in wind with an umbrella or flown on an airplane. If you want to catch a hammerhead shark quickly, you can turn more quickly.
It would be great if scientists were able to look at fossils and trace the development of hammerhead sharks. Most of the teeth of hammerhead sharks are missing. The sharks don't have bones. Cartilage is what your ears and noses are made of. Unlike teeth or bones, cartilage doesn't get fossilized. There is no information about the evolution of hammerhead skulls.
The hammerhead sharks are swimming in the ocean. Their heads are different in size and shape. The heads of some people are close to their bodies. The great hammerhead, the smooth hammerhead, and the Carolina hammerhead are also included.
Smaller hammers are found in the bonnethead, scoophead shark, and small-eye hammerhead.
The first hammerhead sharks did not have much of a hammer but, over time, some evolved larger hammers. The small hammerheads are the oldest species on the family tree, and the huge hammerheads are the newest ones.
Scientists like me have explored this idea using DNA since we don't have fossils. Information about how a living thing will look and function is contained in the genes found in cells. It can be used to look at living things in a different way.
We looked at the relationships among the hammerhead species with the help of their genetic material. We didn't expect the results to be what they were. The younger species had smaller hammers than the older ones.
When scientists think about evolution, they usually assume that living things change a little at a time, fine tuning themselves to take better advantage of their environment. Natural selection is the process of choosing something. Hammerhead evolution shows that it is not always the way it works.
Sometimes an animal can be born with a genetic defect that helps it survive. If the abnormality is survivable the trait can be passed down. That is what happened with hammerhead sharks.
One of the widest heads is found in the winghead shark. Natural selection has shrunken the hammer's size. The bonnethead shark has the smallest hammer of all the hammerheads.
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The author was a student at the University of Florida.
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