Photos are courtesy of Mark Quartiano
Mark Quartiano has caught thousands of sharks, and hooked clients up with thousands more. In fact, the Florida captain is famously known as Mark the Shark.
But until Saturday, Mark the Shark had not encountered anything quite like the monstrous skate that he described as looking “like some kind of dinosaur.”
It was a rare catch, indeed. Quartiano said this shark relative’s scientific name is Dactylobatus clarkii, and a quick Internet search revealed very little information about the species.
SharkReferences.com listed one of its common names as Hookskate. Its geographic distribution includes the Western Central Atlantic, northern Gulf of Mexico, and the northern coast of South America.
It typically resides at depths of 1,000 feet or more, and can grow to immense sizes.
Quartiano, who was fishing with a Japanese film crew, had dropped a whole bonito to the bottom off Miami Beach. Before long, line began to spin from his reel.
“I was fishing at about 500 feet and we were trying to catch a shark for their TV show,” the captain said. “I hooked that monster and it took about four hours to bring it up. “At first I thought it was a large thresher shark, because that’s kind of the way they fight.”
One of the film crew had underwater gear and captured footage that will be released later this year or early next year, Quartiano said.
Quartiano’s crew winched the giant creature out of the water for “three or four minutes” for a photo opportunity, then set it free. Mark the Shark estimated its weight at 800 pounds.
“It was a big female and she swam away pretty quickly,” he said. “It was kind of cool to catch something new for a change… When we first saw it it we didn’t know what it was. It looked really odd… like some kind of dinosaur.”
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–Hat tip to Local 10 News
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