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The largest sharks to ever roam the oceans parked their young in warm, shallow water nurseries where food was plentiful and predators were in short supply until they could assume the title of king and queen of the sea.
But as sea levels dropped in a cooling world, the brutal mega-predator, Otodus megalodons, may have found fewer and fewer safe coastal areas where its young could safely reach adulthood, researchers reported yesterday in the Biology Letters journal of the Royal Society.
In fact, Megalodon’s dependence on nurseries may have contributed to the end of their 20-million-year reign, according to research.
Otodus megalodon – sometimes classified as a Carcharocles megalodon – took 25 years to become an adult – “extremely retarded sexual maturity,” the authors said in the research paper.
But once fully grown, the shark could reach 60 feet, three times the size of the largest white shark made famous by the 1975 hit Jaws.
As an apex predator, and until its extinction about three million years ago, the adult megalodon was unrivaled among other ocean hunters and fed on smaller sharks and even whales.
But its young were vulnerable to attacks from other predators, often other razor-toothed sharks.
Nurseries on shallow continental shelves with vast smaller fish for food and few competing predators have given them the perfect space to reach their impressive size.
“Our results reveal, for the first time, that nursery areas were commonly used by O. megalodon on large time and spatial scales,” said the authors.
The research team discovered a nursery area off the east coast of Spain in the province of Tarragona after visiting a museum and observing a collection of megalodon teeth.
“Many of them were quite small for such a large animal,” British University of Bristol authors Carlos Martinez-Perez and Humberto Ferron told AFP.
Judging by the size of the teeth, they speculated that the area was once home to young megalodons.
The Spanish nursery could be described as “a perfect place to grow,” the authors said.
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