Shark Week

Hi! Bethany here again. My birthday yesterday rocked! The weather couldn't have been more beautiful.  I spent a lot of the day outside with my sisters. We started this new game where we are all witches at Silverspark Academy, which we've decided is the midwestern U.S.'s equivalent of Hogwarts. Running around with "wands" (sticks we found in the backyard), pretending the horses were unicorns, making up new spells and potions... It was great fun.

Then after we'd worn ourselves out, we went inside and stuffed ourselves with popcorn and mini Snickers while watching a Star Trek: Voyager marathon in the basement.

Mom took me up to her room at 10:00 for our sleepover. It's shark week on the Discovery Channel, and a program called "Alien Sharks" was on. At first we were both not so sure we should be watching this before bed, but it ended up being way more interesting than scary. We saw people go down in deep sea submarines, a dead whale lying at the bottom of the ocean become an ecosystem of creatures, a cool robo-jellyfish, and of course some really bizarre-looking deepwater sharks. Here are some of them:

Sixgill shark:

- easily identified because they have 6 gill slits rather than the usual 5


Goblin shark:

- can protrude their jaws out amazingly far to nab prey

Frilled shark:

- they may be responsible for some of the tales about sea serpents, since they definitely look the part

Megamouth shark:

- extremely rare
- has an enormous mouth for filter feeding
- the inside of its mouth has a phosphorescent glow: probably to attract prey