"And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then..."
I open today's fun fact with a quote from one of my favorite movies, Spielberg's "Jaws", specifically the character Quint. Now, I love sharks, and the bad image of them portrayed in this movie is indeed negative (you're more likely to be killed by a pig, falling airplane parts, or a toilet then a shark), the movie truly is a great film, and despite it's bad PR for sharks, I do love it. The quote above is taken from Captain Quint's famous speech late in the film about his experience on the sunken USS Indianapolis. But it brings up an interesting part of shark anatomy: their eyes. The reason that they appear white, as they apparently did when tearing apart Quint's fellow sailors, is because sharks need to protect their eyes during a bite, to keep scratching/biting/stinging prey from damaging them. Most species have a special membrane that shuts over the eye during a bite, but in the great white, they simply roll their eyes back, producing the white eye seen by scared-shitless Quint. How then do they navigate in those last seconds?
Well, sharks have six senses (no, they do not see dead people, don't even think about making that joke, because I've heard it before when explaining this), and the extra one is the ability to detect electrical impulses, even those as weak as the ones given off by working muscle tissue. These are picked up by small pores on the snout called ampullae of lorenzini, allowing the shark to bite with it's eyes safe and sound.I love sharks =)
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