THE NEW YORK TIMES – Whatever it was, the creature was feisty.
The fishermen had spent the last half-hour trying to pull it toward the surface.
“We saw an orange glow below the water and I said, ‘My God, what is this?’” said Garvin Watson, 43, a sport fishing guide and hotel owner in Barra del Parismina, a small town located on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. “We were all screaming like crazy.”
A bright, tangerine-colored nurse shark wriggled alongside the boat. It was unlike any other shark that Mr. Watson, the descendant of a long line of fishers, had ever encountered.
“I find it amazing that at this point in time somebody can still go out to sea, near the coast, and discover something that hasn’t been recorded for science yet. The sea still has surprises for us.”
“I still get goose bumps simply remembering what happened,” he said.
Mr. Watson caught the six-foot nurse shark — mostly docile animals whose snouts have a hint of catfish to them — in August last year, and it garnered some attention after he posted photos of the animal on social media.
Researchers quickly noticed, too, realizing this could be the first recorded case of an orange shark.
“I saw the photos and I was impressed,” said Daniel Arauz Naranjo, a marine biologist and executive director of Costa Rica’s Rescue Center for Endangered Marine Species. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is something strange.’”
This month, Mr. Arauz Naranjo and his colleagues published a study on the shark in the peer-reviewed journal Marine Biodiversity.
They concluded that the nurse shark’s odd pigmentation — the intense yellow-orange hue on its body and ghostly white eyes with no visible iris — might be the result of two rare genetic conditions taking place at the same time: albinism and xanthism …
