Why do hammerhead sharks have hammer-shaped heads?
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Loading... - Bahiti Salem
- 27 Jul 2022
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Hammerhead sharks are the strange-looking ones. They look like someone grabbed their skull by the eye sockets and stretched their heads out sideways, while the rest of their bodies look like those of a normal shark.
You might wonder – what are the advantages of having a hammer-shaped head? And how did hammerhead sharks get that way in the first place?
Benefits of the hammer
Scientists think sharks with hammer-shaped heads have three main advantages.
The first has to do with eyesight. If your eyes were pointing in two opposite directions, say, by your ears, it would give you a much wider field of vision. Each eye would see a different part of the world, so you’d have a better sense of what was around you. But it would be hard to tell how far away things are.
To make up for that trade-off, hammerhead sharks have special sense organs, called ampullae of Lorenzini, scattered on the underside of their hammer. These porelike organs can detect electricity.
The pores basically act like a metal detector, sensing and locating prey buried under sand on the ocean floor. Regular sharks have these sensory organs too, but hammerheads have more. The farther apart these sensory organs are on a hammerhead’s stretched-out head, the more accurate they are at pinpointing the location of food. Read More...
