Dwarf Lanternshark

• Maximum length21 cm (8.3 in); most adults 16–20 cm
• WeightNo reliable measurement (a few tens of grams)
• LifespanUnknown; no validated age data
• Depth range283–439 m (928–1,440 ft)
• DietKrill, small shrimps, lanternfish
• IUCN statusLeast Concern (assessed 2019)

How to recognise a dwarf lanternshark

Nobody confuses a dwarf lanternshark with anything big; the problem is telling it apart from the other small lanternsharks that share its slope. Look first at size: a fully mature female is 16 to 20 cm long, a mature male 16 to 17.5 cm, and even the largest known specimen barely passed 21 cm. The body is slender and the head is long, about a fifth of the total length, with big oval eyes that shine green in torchlight and wide nostrils for the smell-driven life of a deep-water fish.

Each of the two dorsal fins is preceded by a grooved spine, the mark of the whole dogfish order. The second dorsal fin is noticeably larger than the first and its spine is longer, and there is no anal fin at all, which rules out the catsharks straight away. The tail has a long upper lobe and a weak lower one.

Colour does most of the work. The back and flanks are dark brown, the belly is black, and the boundary between the two is a sharp line rather than a fade. A narrow black band runs along the base of the tail, and in fresh animals the black areas are pricked with hundreds of minute photophores. Under a microscope the upper teeth show sexual dimorphism: males carry a central cusp flanked by two pairs of small cusplets, females only one pair. The lower teeth are blade-like and overlap into a single cutting edge, the standard Etmopterus arrangement, with 25 to 32 rows above and 30 to 34 below. Its closest look-alike on the same grounds is the Caribbean lanternshark, which grows to nearly half as long again.

How big is the dwarf lanternshark?

The numbers that make this species famous come from a handful of trawl catches, so they are worth stating precisely. When Stewart Springer and George Burgess described the species in 1985, the largest of their specimens was a female of 21.2 cm (8.3 in), and no bigger one has been reported since. Males reach maturity at 16 to 17.5 cm and females at 15.5 to 19.5 cm, so an animal the length of a ballpoint pen is a full-grown adult. Free-living young of 5.5 to 6 cm have been recorded, which is roughly the size at birth, since a female carries her pups until they are fully formed.

Weight has never been published for the species; a fish this short and this slim can only be a few tens of grams. Whether the dwarf lanternshark is really the smallest shark on Earth is a fair question, because two other candidates, the spined pygmy shark and the pygmy ribbontail catshark, mature at similar lengths and reach about 24 to 28 cm. On maximum recorded length E. perryi wins by a few centimetres, which is why it heads our list of the ten smallest sharks. The bar below sets that 21 cm against a diver.

Where dwarf lanternsharks live

The dwarf lanternshark has one of the smallest confirmed ranges of any shark. Every specimen with a locality comes from the southern Caribbean: the continental slope off Colombia between Barranquilla, Santa Marta and the Guajira Peninsula, the waters around the Los Testigos islands off Venezuela, and the slope south of Grenada. Whether it lives elsewhere in the basin is unknown; deep-water surveys along most of the Caribbean coast are sparse, and a fish this small slips through the mesh of commercial nets.

The known depths are 283 to 439 m (928 to 1,440 ft). That is the upper continental slope, not the shelf as some older accounts say: below the shelf break, on a muddy or sandy bottom where sunlight is a faint blue memory and the water sits at roughly 8 to 12 °C. The species almost certainly lives close to the seabed, since all the captures were made by bottom trawls, but lanternsharks in general also rise off the bottom at night to feed in the plankton layer, and nothing rules that out here.

Because nobody has followed a living animal, seasonal movement, home range and population size are simply unknown. The map below shows the confirmed localities; treat the shading as a guide to where the species has been caught, not to where it stops.

What dwarf lanternsharks eat

Stomach contents from the type series and later museum specimens are the whole of the evidence, and they hold krill, small shrimps and the remains of small fish, most likely lanternfish and other midwater species that sink or swim within reach of the slope. A shark of 20 cm with a mouth a centimetre wide cannot take much else, and its blade-like lower teeth are built to snip soft-bodied prey rather than crush shells.

How it finds that prey in near darkness is inferred from its relatives. The large eyes are packed with rod cells and tuned to the blue-green wavelengths that both faint daylight and bioluminescence produce at 300 m, so the shark can spot the glow of a shrimp or the photophores of a lanternfish. The nostrils are broad, and the snout carries the ampullae of Lorenzini that pick up the muscle signals of an animal buried in silt. Vision and electroreception together let a very small predator make a living where sight alone would fail.

The often repeated idea that the belly lights are a lure that draws prey in is unproven for this species. In lanternsharks generally the ventral photophores match the dim light from above so that the shark's silhouette disappears to anything looking up, a trick called counter-illumination; that hides the shark from its own predators, and it may also let it drift down on prey unseen. Both roles fit the evidence better than a glowing bait. Our page on bioluminescent sharks explains how the light is made.

Behaviour and adaptations to the deep

No dwarf lanternshark has ever been watched in the wild or kept alive, so its behaviour is read off the body and off better-studied cousins such as the velvet belly lanternshark of the eastern Atlantic. The most telling feature is the pattern of light. The belly photophores glow a steady blue that cancels the shark's shadow from below, while the flank and tail markings, which differ in shape from one lanternshark species to the next, are thought to work as identification badges in the dark, letting sharks recognise their own kind and perhaps each other's sex. Pigment cells surrounding the photophores can spread or contract to dim the glow, so the animal adjusts its brightness to the light above.

Small deep-water dogfish of this family tend to be found in loose groups of similar size and often of one sex, and trawls that catch one usually catch several, which suggests the dwarf lanternshark is not a solitary animal. Weak swimming muscles, a large oily liver for buoyancy and a slow metabolism are the standard slope-dweller toolkit, and the species has all three. What it does across a day, whether it rises at night like many lanternsharks, and how far an individual roams remain open questions that only a deep-water camera survey off Colombia could answer.

Reproduction and lifespan

Reproduction is aplacental viviparity, the rule in the dogfish order: eggs are fertilised internally and the embryos develop inside the mother on the yolk stored in each egg, with no placenta and no extra nourishment, until they are born as miniature adults. Females examined by Springer and Burgess carried two or three embryos, and the free-swimming young of 5.5 to 6 cm confirm the size at birth. Gestation has not been measured; in related lanternsharks it runs well over a year, and with litters this small a female probably breeds only every second year.

Males mature at 16 to 17.5 cm and females at 15.5 to 19.5 cm. Nothing is known of the age at which they get there, nor how long they live; no vertebral ageing study exists, and the dorsal spines, which are used to age some dogfish, have not been examined for this species. Related small lanternsharks live for a decade or more, and slow growth is normal in cold water, so a lifespan somewhere in that range is a reasonable guess and no more. Where the pups are born, and whether there is a nursery depth, are also unknown. For the general picture of shark ageing see how long sharks live, and for the four ways sharks breed see shark reproduction.

Are dwarf lanternsharks dangerous?

The dwarf lanternshark is harmless in every sense. Its mouth is about a centimetre across, its teeth are made for krill, and it lives a quarter of a kilometre below the surface where no swimmer, surfer or diver has ever met one. The only people who have handled the species are fishery scientists and museum staff sorting trawl catches, and the SharkSider attack database has never attributed an incident to a lanternshark of any kind.

If anything, the danger runs the other way. A fish this small and this slow is an easy meal for larger sharks and big bony fish, which is why its whole body is built around not being seen. Keep the size in mind when you read about deep-sea sharks: most of the roughly 500 living species are closer to this one than to a tiger shark, and the handful that bite people are the exception, not the rule.

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 assessed the dwarf lanternshark in 2019 and placed it in Least Concern, with the caveat that the assessors were working from very few records. The species is not listed on CITES or on the Convention on Migratory Species, and no country protects it by name.

The reasoning behind the status is geographic. Deep-water trawling off Colombia and Venezuela is limited, and the shrimp trawlers of the southern Caribbean shelf work shallower than 283 m, so the shark's whole known habitat sits below the main fishing effort. The animals that do come up in nets have no commercial value and are discarded, and a fish of a few grams is likely to pass through a cod-end in the first place. That makes it one of the few sharks whose rarity in collections says more about sampling than about numbers.

The honest gap is that a species known from a strip of slope a few hundred kilometres long could be hit hard by any expansion of deep-water fishing or by seabed oil and gas work in the Colombian basin, and nobody would notice for years. It belongs on the list of sharks that need survey effort rather than rescue, unlike the larger relatives discussed on our page on why sharks are endangered.

Similar species and close relatives

The genus Etmopterus holds around forty species and is one of the two largest shark genera, most of its members small, dark and deep. In the western Atlantic the dwarf lanternshark's neighbours are the Caribbean lanternshark, which shares its slope and reaches about 30 cm, and the green lanternshark of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean at about 26 cm. Farther afield are the velvet belly of Europe, the smooth lanternshark of the North Atlantic, the blackbelly lanternshark of the western Pacific and the recently named ninja lanternshark off Central America. All carry the two dorsal spines, the missing anal fin and the black ventral photophore field.

Its rivals for the title of smallest shark belong to other families: the spined pygmy shark and the smalleye pygmy shark are kitefin sharks that also glow, and the pygmy ribbontail catshark is a catshark with an anal fin and no spines. If you find a tiny dark shark in a Caribbean trawl, count the fins first: two spines and no anal fin puts it in this family, and a length under 21 cm with mature reproductive organs makes it a dwarf lanternshark.

• Caribbean Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Green Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Velvet Belly Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Blackbelly Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Spined Pygmy Sharkspecies profile
• Smalleye Pygmy Sharkspecies 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 August 19, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.