I used to think goblin sharks were just ugly.
Then I held one—or tried to hold one, anyway—during a research trip off the coast of Japan in 2018, and the whole thing felt like trying to grip a waterlogged sponge that had been left in the sun too long. The flesh gave way under my fingers, not in a diseased way, but in this oddly intentional manner, like the shark had decided bones were optional and muscle tone was for suckers. Turns out, that flabbiness isn’t a defect or some evolutionary oversight—it’s exactly what keeps these deep-sea weirdos alive in an environment that would crush most other creatures into paste. The goblin shark’s body composition, roughly 60% water by weight (give or take, depending on which biologist you ask), is a direct adaptation to life at depths between 900 and 4,000 feet, where the pressure reaches levels that would make a submarine engineer nervous. Their skeletal structure is barely calcified, their muscles are gelatinous and metabolically sluggish, and their skin lacks the firmness we associate with, well, pretty much every other shark species. It’s unsettling, honestly, because we expect predators to be sleek and powerful, and here’s this pink nightmare that feels like it might dissolve if you looked at it wrong.
Here’s the thing: firm bodies are expensive.
Building dense muscle tissue requires protein, maintaining rigid bones demands calcium, and keeping everything metabolically active burns through energy reserves faster than a goblin shark can say “I live where food is scarce.” Down in the mesopelagic and bathypelagic zones—the ocean’s middle and deep layers, where sunlight is a distant memory and prey might swim past once a week if you’re lucky—every calorie counts. The goblin shark’s soft, flabby body is essentially a energy-conservation masterpiece, a physiological budget plan that sacrifices speed and strength for the ability to just… exist. Their reduced muscle density means they can’t chase down fast-moving prey, but they don’t need to, because their extendable jaws (which shoot forward like something out of a horror movie) do the grabbing for them.
The Physics of Not Giving a Damn About Hydrodynamics
Most sharks are built like torpedoes because they hunt in open water where speed matters. The goblin shark, though, is built like a dirigible that’s losing air.
Their flabby bodies create significant drag, which sounds like a design flaw until you realize they’re not racing anyone. Deep-sea life is a waiting game, and the goblin shark’s body is optimized for hovering, drifting, and conserving energy rather than sprinting after prey. The high water content in their tissues also helps with buoyancy regulation—seawater and shark tissue have similar densities, which means they don’t have to work as hard to maintain their position in the water column. Compare that to a great white, which has to keep swimming constantly to avoid sinking like a stone, and you start to see the appeal of being squishy. I guess it makes sense when you think about it: why build a sports car when you live on a road with no speed limit but also no destinations?
Wait—maybe “lazy” is the wrong word.
Because calling the goblin shark lazy ignores the fact that their entire body plan is a sophisticated response to one of Earth’s harshest environments, a place where the temperature hovers around 39°F, the pressure could flatten a tin can into a coin, and the nearest meal might be a dead squid drifting down from the surface layers like manna from a very dark, very cold heaven. Their soft bodies also reduce their acoustic signature, making them harder for prey to detect through the lateral line system that most fish use to sense movement—though honestly, I’m not sure how much that matters when your jaw unhinges like a demonic Pez dispenser and your prey is probably half-blind anyway. The flabbiness extends to their liver, which is enormous and oil-filled, providing both buoyancy and a long-term energy reserve that lets them survive prolonged periods without food. Some researchers estimate goblin sharks can go months between substantial meals, though “estimate” is doing heavy lifting there since we’ve observed maybe a few dozen individuals in their natural habitat, ever.
What Happens When You Bring a Goblin Shark to the Surface (Spoiler: Nothing Good)
The few goblin sharks that have been caught alive and brought to the surface definately don’t handle the pressure change well.
Their bodies, adapted for deep-sea compression, essentially lose structural integrity when exposed to surface conditions—imagine a building designed to withstand constant external pressure suddenly having that pressure removed, and you’ll get the idea. The flabby tissue that works perfectly at depth becomes a liability in shallower water, where the lack of muscle tone and skeletal rigidity means they can barely swim in a coordinated manner. Most specimens die within hours of capture, though whether that’s from the pressure change, the temperature shift, or just the sheer stress of being yanked from their environment by a fishing net is hard to say. I’ve seen footage of a live goblin shark in a Japanese aquarium tank, and it looked exhausted, like it was fighting gravity itself just to move forward—which, in a sense, it was, because its body was built for an environment where “up” and “down” matter less than we surface-dwellers can really comprehend. There’s something almost tragic about watching an animal so perfectly adapted to one niche become completely helpless in another, though I suppose that’s true for most specialists. Anyway, the flabbiness that makes goblin sharks successful deep-sea ambush predators is the same trait that makes them terrible candidates for captivity, which is probably for the best because who really needs to see one of these things up close more than once?
