In this article, you will find six fish with big mouths:
Pelican Eel
Sarcastic Fringehead
Frilled Shark
Great White Shark
Whale Shark
Basking Shark
Pelican Eel
This deep-sea creature is known for its large mouth, which is much bigger than its body. The mouth is loosely hinged and can be opened wide enough to swallow a fish much larger than the eel.
The eel expands to hold large volumes of water and prey like a pelican. Excess water is jettisoned via paired gill slits, while the food – small crustaceans and invertebrates – moves into the stomach, which expands to accommodate it.
The Pelican Eel is found in the deep ocean in tropical and temperate regions around the world, although not near the surface. This mysterious fish is a master of the deep, and humans do not often see it. The eel’s body is black, and it can grow to be up to three feet long.
Sarcastic Fringehead
This fish is known for its massive mouth that it uses to protect its love den. It opens its mouth to show off its size and intimidate predators when threatened.
The Sarcastic Fringehead is a type of blenny that lives in the temperate coastal waters of California and Mexico’s Baja California. They are typically found in rocky crevices or discarded shells on the seafloor. They are small, usually no more than 30 cm in length, but their oversized mouth makes them stand out.
Male Sarcastic Fringe heads have a much larger mouth than females, which they use to attract mates and defend their territory. They are known for their aggressive behaviour towards other males, often engaging in mouth-to-mouth showdowns where they open their fluorescent mouths wide to intimidate their opponent.
Frilled Shark
This fascinating creature has a wide head, huge mouth, and long, slender body. The frilled shark is sometimes called a “living fossil” because it’s thought to be very similar to a prehistoric ancestor that lived eighty million years ago.
Another unique feature of the frilled shark is its frilly gills, which give it its name. These gills are used to extract oxygen from the water, and they’re also a striking visual feature that makes the frilled shark stand out from other sharks.
Frilled sharks are found in deep waters around the world, and humans rarely encounter them. Scientists have learned about these creatures by dissecting individuals captured in deep-sea net fisheries and observing the occasional live individual in captivity.
Great White Shark
The great white shark is one of the world’s most iconic and well-known fish. It is a fearsome predator that can grow up to 20 feet long and weigh over 5,000 pounds. But perhaps the most striking feature of the great white shark is its massive mouth, which can open up to 4 feet wide.
The great white shark’s mouth is full of razor-sharp teeth that are constantly being replaced throughout its lifetime. It has rows of teeth that can number up to 300 at any given time, with new teeth growing to replace lost or damaged ones. This allows the great white shark to maintain its deadly bite force, up to 18,000 newtons.
Despite its fearsome reputation, the great white shark is not a mindless killing machine. It is an intelligent and curious animal known to interact with humans non-aggressively.
Whale Shark
This gentle giant is the largest fish in the world, with an average length of 18 to 32.8 feet and a weight of 20.6 tons. To put that into perspective, a Whale Shark is about the same size as a school bus!
Despite their massive size, Whale Sharks are harmless to humans. They feed on tiny plankton and fish eggs, which they filter feed as they swim slowly along with their giant mouths wide open. They are one of only three species of filter-feeding sharks.
Whale Sharks are found in tropical oceans around the world. They inhabit warm waters in the western Atlantic Ocean from the coast of New York in the United States to central Brazil, including the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. In the eastern Atlantic, they occur from the coasts of Senegal, Mauritania, and Cape Verde to the Gulf of Guinea.
Basking Shark
This gentle giant is the second largest fish in the world, and it has a mouth that can reach up to three feet wide. Despite its intimidating appearance, the Basking Shark is a filter feeder that feeds on planktonic prey.
The Basking Shark is found worldwide in boreal to warm-temperate waters. It lives around the continental shelf and occasionally enters brackish waters. It is found from the surface down to at least 910 meters.
This slow-moving migratory shark is often sighted swimming close to the surface with its huge mouth open, filtering up to 2,000 tons of seawater per hour over its complicated gills to scoop up zooplankton.
The Basking Shark has a unique appearance that sets it apart from other sharks. It has a broad, flattened head with a conical snout and a large, crescent-shaped mouth. Its upper jaw has six rows of teeth, and its lower jaw has nine rows, but they are small and relatively useless.