I’ve seen my fair share of large sharks. Up close, on the end of a line, stuffed on a wall…I’ve fished them, and eaten them.
This photo of a huge mako shark looks to me to be authentic. But as far as taxonomy goes…I didn’t know mako sharks got that big. I’ve never seen one that huge.
Jeez… My ex long-line fished for mako for years, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen one that big, even in photographs. I’ve never even heard of one…
Although, a quick Google tells me (via Wiki, so…) that a longfin mako can be up to 4 meters long… holy crap.
It’s a camera-angle thing. Because the shark is in the foreground, it looks comparatively larger. No Photoshop hocus-pocus to my mind.
Phlosphr, Makos are absolutely huge and abundant right now. It’s an amazing Mako scene in our part of the Atlantic (New Jersey up to New England).
That photo is legit, but the scale is changed because the Mako is closer to the camera.
But I’ve been at the docks and the Makos are 8-10 feet (freaks of 12+) and just dang huge. In the Atlantic City Press, they ran a story about the Makos and there are pics where the fish is hanging next to the crew, more in scale and they are still big and scary.
Let me surf the AC Press site for the pics. I fish off the Cape May, NJ coast.
Everyone that sees them hanging thinks of “Jaws” and make comments about it being a Great White.
Can’t access the NJ story, but there was a Thresher caught off our waters and it was 14.5’ long:
*"Thursday, June 21, 2007
There are numerous reports about offshore big-game fishing heating up as we head into summer.
Sportfishermen going for sharks in two recent tournaments out of Cape May came back with reports of tuna, and it seemed to expand from there.
Most of the reports are from the weekend when more boats got out, but hookups continued into this week.
A 520-pound thresher shark was caught Saturday at the 28-Mile Wreck on the Hooker with captain Frank Haney. It was a Father’s Day trip chartered by Pennsylvanian Bill Long, according to Haney. The thresher was 174 inches in length (14.5 feet) when measured at Moran’s Dockside in Avalon (Cape May County)"*
Fisherman: I dunno, I think it’s a mako.
Fisherman: With a deep throat !
Fisherman: Yeah but what kind? What kind of shark?
Hooper: Tiger shark.
Fisherman: A what?
Vaughn: Hey, we can start breathing again! Ben getting plenty of pictures for
the papers?
Martin: Oh, you bet he is!
Fisherman: What is this bite radius crap?!
Fisherman: That is a big mouth! Look at it!
Hooper: All I’m trying to tell you is –
Fisherman: Why don’t you stuff your friggin’ head in there, man, and find out
if it’s a man-eater! All right?!
I miss Peter Benchley. He was from my town.
Y’know, I opened the picture to see if it was of the giant mako that was caught up in Yarmouth a few years ago, and it is. (I’m still annoyed I wasn’t there that day). There is the camera angle thing too, but the picture is real.
There’s an article on Snopes about it.
Standard fisherman trickery. Put the fish in the foreground to make it look bigger.
Any fisherman knows that when you pose with your bass you hold the fish out at arm’s length in front of you.
That photo in the OP freaked me out.
I thought it was going to be a stuffed fish on a wall, not huge mouth, bloody teeth in 3-fricken-D!
Reading the SNopes article made me feel quite bad for that “queen of the sea”. At least the one who caught her was dignified about it, saying “if I had cought her by myself I would have let her go…”
Mako… yummy…
