When my grandmother watched that classic piece of cinema, Jaws, she stayed out of the water for weeks. Certainly, if being eaten by a shark is a worry, not swimming is the thing to do. How many people would have survived Jaws if the mayor just closed the beach?
Unfortunately, it seems like getting out of the water may not help anymore. Walking sharks are now real, in case you thought 2020 was done messing with your life.

Sharks With Legs??

Nope! Luckily, things have not gotten quite that dire. Instead, these little guys, also called epaulette sharks, “walk” with their fins, mostly the ones on their pectoral and pelvic areas.  (1, 2)

Did You Say “Little”?

Yes! Fortunately, these sharks aren’t really that big–their maximum size is three-and-a-half feet long. In fact, when they’re born, they’re only around five inches long! (1)

What Do Walking Sharks Eat?

If you were wondering if these guys would eat you, they won’t. Instead, they eat tinier prey–small fish, worms, shrimp, krill, prawns, barnacles, and other crustaceans. They do mostly feed in the shallows, however, including rock pools, so you may actually be more likely to run into them than a great white. On the other hand, they mainly reside around New Guinea, Eastern Indonesia, and parts of Australia, so depending on where you vacation, you might never cross paths with them. (1, 2)

“Walking, Swimming Or Hitching A Ride?”

Scientists from Australia, Indonesia, and the United States released a paper in the journal Marine and Freshwater Research about the walking shark. When digging deeper into epaulette sharks, the researchers on the team actually discovered four new kinds of walking sharks! The newest species of epaulette sharks could have evolved only two million years ago. And while that seems like a long time, Mark Erdmann, one of the paper’s researchers says that’s not the case. Sharks as a whole are 400 million years old, while walking sharks, as a ‘type,’ “evolved just 9 million years ago,” according to his interview with Conservation International. This makes “them the ‘youngest’ sharks on our planet.” Two million years seem like nothing in comparison. (2, 3, 4)

What Exactly Is A Species?

A species is a subsection of a genus. If that’s all Latin to you, essentially it means that a genus is the big collection–say snakes, or humanoids–and a species is something like “boa constrictors” or “homo sapiens.” As for the process of how species happen, Erdmann explains it like this: Speciation typically happens when individuals of a given species get separated from their main population — sometimes by walking or swimming or being carried away on a current to an isolated place. If they are lucky enough to survive and breed, eventually evolution will take this new population in a different direction and often leads to a new species.

That’s why their article is named “Walking, swimming, or hitching a ride?” The sharks would separate, usually by walking or swimming, and then tides would rise, food would shift, or other things that kept them apart. One set of sharks even got stranded on a drifting island! (4)