Some are the size of a cigar, others outweigh an elephant, and all are on display at Auckland Museum’s newest exhibition, titled: Sharks.
The exhibition opens on Wednesday, offering visitors a detailed display where they can learn about the hundreds of shark species in our waters.
Clinton Duffy, Auckland Museum’s curator of marine biology believes sharks are one of the most misunderstood animals in the world. He tells The Detail even dangerous sharks like great whites, tiger sharks, and bull sharks generally don’t attack people.
“We’re not part of their normal diet and most sharks are naturally cautious … particularly of things that they don’t know,” he says.
But stepping inside the exhibition seems to contradict this.
The first room is filled with four life-sized models, including the great white and the 270-million-year-old, now-extinct Helicoprion, which has ignited debate over whether it actually is a shark or a fish.
“It’s a very, very early relative of a shark,” Duffy says.
The standout of the Helicoprion is its set of teeth, which run lengthwise down the middle of its tongue and give it the nickname “Buzzsaw Shark”.
“There’s been a lot of debate, ever since the first fossils were found, about how [the toothed tongue] functions and what its purpose was,” Duffy says.
“It’s now thought that those teeth rotated backwards … into the mouth as the jaw closed … it’s thought that they impaled prey on the tips of those teeth and when they closed the mouth the teeth rotated back in and pulled the prey in,” he says.
Modern sharks are known for their rows of sharp teeth, too, and while they’re depicted as vicious beasts in many films, sharks aren’t always the predator.
Duffy says a combination of a slow growth rate and limited reproduction make sharks vulnerable to over-fishing.
“Over-fishing is the biggest threat to sharks and rays globally.
“In New Zealand most of our shark populations seem to be in pretty good shape [but] there are not anywhere near as many of them as there used to be,” he says.
Duffy says about 3,000 tonnes of shark is caught in New Zealand every year, often unintentionally, with sharks being caught in nets.
“If a fisherman catches it, they may as well use it,” he says.
“Many of the large species of shark have to keep swimming to stay alive, they have to keep swimming to breath and ventilate their gills and as soon as they get caught … they start drowning,” he says.
Sharks play an important part in the ecosystem, and overfishing can and does have unforeseen consequences.
Duffy says in the Atlantic it resulted in a population boom of the cownose ray.
“They feed heavily on scallops and the result of that has been that there have been some pretty large and important scallop fisheries completely devastated by the cownose ray.
“You would think if we get rid of the sharks everything’s going to be good, but you can get these big population explosions of species that never caused anybody any trouble before … because their numbers were being kept under control by sharks,” Duffy says.
“Just removing one component of [the ecosystem] means you can really tip the balance.”
The Sharks exhibition debuts 10 December and remains open until 27 April, 2026.
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