Naval officers spotted this freaky pig-faced shark floating dead off the coast of Elba, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. It's an angular roughshark (Oxynotus centrina) that's nicknamed "pig fish" not just for its peculiar mug. From LiveScience:
"It is commonly called a 'pig fish' because when it comes out of the water it emits a kind of grunt," Yuri Tiberto of the Elba Aquarium in Italy, told Toscana Media News following the recent discovery.
According to the Elba Island app Facebook page, naval officers found the roughshark floating dead in the water before they hauled it onto the pier. The sharks are plentiful in the Mediterranean, where their spiny dorsal fins and relatively large bodies make them vulnerable to fishing operations, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Because of this, angular roughshark populations have been in decline for decades, and the species is considered vulnerable (that's one slot safer than "endangered" on the Red List's scale).
images: Isola d'Elba App
