Caribbean Lanternshark

• Maximum lengthAbout 30 cm (12 in); males smaller
• WeightNo published maximum; a few hundred grams
• LifespanUnknown; no ageing study exists
• Depth rangeAbout 300–700 m (1,000–2,300 ft)
• DietSmall squid, shrimps and small fish
• IUCN statusLeast Concern

How to recognise a Caribbean lanternshark

The body is short and thick for a deep-sea dogfish, with a broad flattened head, a bluntly rounded snout and very large green eyes. There is no anal fin, and each dorsal fin carries a stout grooved spine, the second fin and its spine noticeably bigger than the first. The tail is long and narrow with a well-marked notch near the tip of the upper lobe.

Colour is what actually identifies the animal. The back is grey-brown and the underside is abruptly, velvety black, and the boundary between the two is sharp rather than graded. On each flank a narrow black band runs above and behind the pelvic fin, with smaller dark marks scattered along the tail stalk and around the base of the caudal fin. Those markings are not decoration: each one sits over a dense patch of photophores, and their exact shape and position are the main way specialists separate one lanternshark from another, since more than forty species in the genus look broadly alike.

The teeth differ between the jaws, which is a family trait. The upper jaw holds slender multi-cusped teeth for gripping, and the lower jaw a single interlocking row of broad, blade-like teeth with the cusp tilted sideways, forming a continuous cutting edge. The dermal denticles on the flanks are short, thorn-shaped and scattered irregularly rather than set in neat rows, which is a useful check against the other small lanternsharks of the region.

How big does a Caribbean lanternshark get?

It is one of the smallest sharks in the Atlantic. The largest recorded individuals are about 30 cm (12 in) in total length, and a typical adult female measures 26 to 30 cm while males stop a few centimetres shorter, at around 20 to 27 cm. Laid flat on a bench, a grown Caribbean lanternshark is shorter than a sheet of A4 paper.

Pups are born at roughly 9 cm, about the length of an adult's thumb, and are already fully formed miniature versions of their parents, complete with dorsal spines and working light organs. Males mature from about 20 cm and females from about 26 cm, so, as in most squaliform sharks, both sexes are breeding well before they reach maximum size and females end up the larger sex.

No maximum weight has been published, and it is not a useful figure for an animal of this size: a full-grown individual weighs a few hundred grams at most, much of that accounted for by a large oil-filled liver. Only a handful of sharks worldwide are smaller, and the species belongs on any honest list of the smallest shark species, alongside its cousin the dwarf lanternshark. The scale below places those 30 cm next to a 1.8 m diver.

Where Caribbean lanternsharks live

The range is the western North Atlantic, running from Virginia and the Carolinas down past Florida and out to Bermuda, then through the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico to the island slopes of the Lesser Antilles. Despite the common name it is not a Caribbean basin species in the strict sense; the records cluster along the north and east of the region, and the western and southern Caribbean are largely blank.

What defines its habitat is not latitude but the slope itself. This shark lives on and just above the bottom of the upper continental and insular slopes, over sand and soft sediment, at depths of roughly 300 to 700 m. That band sits below the reach of any diver, in permanent darkness at about 8 to 12 °C, on the drop-offs that fall away a few kilometres outside the coral reefs of the same islands.

Its vertical position matters for a second reason. The slope at those depths intercepts the deep scattering layer, the enormous mass of small squid, shrimps and lanternfish that rises towards the surface each night and sinks again at dawn, and that daily delivery of food is what supports a shark community of lanternsharks, gulper sharks and catsharks on tropical Atlantic slopes. The map below shows where the species has actually been collected.

What Caribbean lanternsharks eat

No large dietary study exists for this species, but the stomach contents that have been examined, and the diets of closely related Atlantic lanternsharks, point the same way: small squid first, then shrimps and other crustaceans, then small bony fishes, including lanternfishes that come down from the scattering layer. Squid beaks are the commonest identifiable remains in lanternshark stomachs generally, and the jaws of this shark are built for exactly that job.

The mechanism is worth describing, because it is unusual. The gripping teeth of the upper jaw hold the prey while the single fused row of blade-like lower teeth works as one long cutting edge; a shark of 25 cm can therefore take a bite out of a squid larger than its own head instead of being limited to what it can swallow whole. Lanternsharks are also known to scavenge, and a dead fish arriving on the slope will draw them in.

Finding food in the dark relies on the same three senses used by every deep-sea shark: enormous eyes tuned to the faint bioluminescence of the prey itself, a lateral line that registers movement in the water, and the electroreceptive ampullae of Lorenzini for the final approach. The old idea that a shark can smell blood across miles of ocean, dealt with on our page on how far sharks can smell blood, is even less relevant down here, where a scent trail must travel through water that barely moves.

Behaviour, light and life on the slope

The defining feature of this shark's life is that it makes its own light. The belly and flanks carry thousands of photophores, each a cup of light-producing cells under a lens, and in lanternsharks their output is controlled hormonally rather than by nerves, so the glow builds and fades slowly instead of flashing. The blue-green light produced on the underside matches the dim light filtering down from above and erases the shark's silhouette from the view of anything looking up, a trick called counter-illumination.

The flank bands do something different. They are oriented so that they are visible from the side rather than from below, and since the pattern is unique to each species it is thought to work as a recognition signal, letting a lanternshark identify another of its own kind in water where vision is otherwise useless. The dorsal spines also carry luminous tissue at the base in some lanternsharks, which may advertise that the shark is armed.

Beyond the light, little is known. The species has never been kept alive, tagged or filmed, and no submersible study has reported it. Trawls often bring up several individuals together, which suggests loose aggregation, sometimes sorted by size or sex. The general pattern of deep-slope sharks applies: slow swimming supported by an oily liver, a low metabolic rate and long intervals between meals, the sort of economy described on our page about how sharks breathe and move water across their gills.

Reproduction and lifespan

Caribbean lanternsharks are yolk-sac viviparous, sometimes called aplacental viviparous or ovoviviparous: the eggs are fertilised and retained inside the mother, each embryo feeding on its own yolk supply with no placental link, and the pups are born fully developed. There is no egg case, and nothing is laid on the bottom. The published litter size is four or five pups, and newborns measure about 9 cm.

Males mature at around 20 cm and females at about 26 cm. Gestation length has not been measured in this species. In the better-studied lanternsharks it runs well over a year, and females are often found carrying developing eggs and embryos at the same time, which suggests an almost continuous reproductive cycle rather than a seasonal one. That makes sense on a slope where temperature and food supply hardly change through the year.

Lifespan is unknown. Nobody has aged this shark, and the lightly calcified vertebrae of small squaliforms are difficult to read, so any number quoted for it would be an invention. The few deep-sea dogfish that have been aged successfully live for decades, and the general relationship between cold, slow growth and longevity set out on our how long sharks live page suggests this one is no sprinter either. Four pups at a time, produced by a female the length of a pencil case, is a very small reproductive output however long she lives.

Are Caribbean lanternsharks dangerous?

No, and not in any qualified sense. A 30 cm shark that lives 300 to 700 m down, in water no swimmer can reach, has no mechanism for harming a person. Our database holds no incident attributed to the species, as the note below records, and none has ever been reported anywhere. Divers over the reefs of the Bahamas, Cuba or Puerto Rico are swimming hundreds of metres above its habitat and will never meet one.

The practical caution is for people handling deep-water catches. The two dorsal spines are sharp enough to puncture a palm, and the skin is covered in thorn-like denticles that graze bare hands, so a lanternshark sorted out of a trawl should be picked up with a glove. The bite itself would amount to a scratch. For context on how the genuinely risky species compare, our list of the least dangerous sharks and the overview at what is a shark are better starting points than any film.

The SharkSider database has no incident attributed to this species. The database draws on the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports, and is updated weekly.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List assesses the Caribbean lanternshark as Least Concern. The species is widespread along the western Atlantic slopes, it has no commercial value at any size, and most of its depth range lies below the fisheries that operate in the region. It is not listed on CITES or the Convention on Migratory Species, and no country gives it specific protection.

The threats that exist are indirect. Deepwater trawling and trapping for royal red shrimp, snappers and groupers on the slopes of the south-eastern United States and the Antilles takes lanternsharks as bycatch, and because they have no market they go back over the side, almost always dead. The species is too small to be retained even for fishmeal, so it disappears from catch statistics entirely and nobody knows how many are killed.

The vulnerability is the same one that affects every deep-sea shark: an animal that produces four or five pups at a time, matures at 20 cm and lives in cold water where everything happens slowly cannot absorb sustained losses. Slope habitats are also easy to damage and slow to recover, since bottom gear removes the sponges and corals that structure the seabed along with the fish. Where deep-water fishing has expanded, the small sharks of the slope have been among the quiet casualties, a pattern set out on our page on why sharks are endangered.

Similar species and close relatives

Etmopterus is the largest genus of sharks on Earth, with more than forty described species, and the Caribbean lanternshark sits in the middle of a cluster of small western Atlantic members that are genuinely hard to tell apart. The green lanternshark shares much of its range and depth band and is separated mainly by the shape of its flank markings and its denticle pattern. The dwarf lanternshark, known from the Caribbean slope off Colombia and Venezuela, is smaller still and is often called the smallest shark in the world.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic the smooth lanternshark and the far larger great lanternshark of the deep north Atlantic show how much variation the genus contains, while the splendid lanternshark of the Indo-Pacific illustrates the same body plan on the other side of the world. In every case the reliable characters are the flank and tail markings, the arrangement of the dermal denticles and the relative sizes of the dorsal spines.

On the same slopes, and often in the same trawl, the Caribbean roughshark is an easy contrast: also a small squaliform of the region, but humpbacked, with a triangular sail-like first dorsal fin and rough sandpaper skin. Gulper sharks and deepwater catsharks share the habitat and are larger and browner.

• Green Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Dwarf Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Smooth Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Great Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Splendid Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Caribbean Roughsharkspecies profile

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published October 12, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.