The little gulper shark (Centrophorus uyato) is a small deep-water dogfish of the family Centrophoridae, growing to about 110 cm (3 ft 7 in) and 7.3 kg, that lives on and near the bottom of continental slopes between roughly 50 and 1,400 m. It is grey-brown with a long pointed snout, very large greenish eyes, a spine in front of each dorsal fin and no anal fin.
It eats deep-water bony fish, squid and crustaceans, and females carry usually a single pup, born at 40 to 50 cm. The IUCN assessed the species as Endangered in 2024 after decades of trawl and longline fishing for its oil-rich liver. It lives far too deep to meet a swimmer.
- Maximum length110 cm (3 ft 7 in)
- Weight7.3 kg (16 lb) maximum published
- LifespanNot measured; gulper sharks are slow-growing and long-lived
- Depth range50–1,400 m (165–4,600 ft), usually below 200 m
- DietDeep-water bony fish, squid, crustaceans
- IUCN statusEndangered (assessed 2024)
- Kingdom
- Animalia
- Phylum
- Chordata
- Class
- Chondrichthyes
- Order
- Squaliformes
- Family
- Centrophoridae
- Genus
- Centrophorus
- Species
- Centrophorus uyato
- Family (common)
- Gulper sharks
- Also known as
- Uyato, Little gulper
On this page
- How to recognise a little gulper shark
- How big does the little gulper shark get?
- Where little gulper sharks live
- What little gulper sharks eat
- Behaviour and life on the slope
- Reproduction and lifespan
- Is the little gulper shark dangerous?
- Conservation status
- Relatives and look-alikes
- Frequently asked questions
- References
How to recognise a little gulper shark
Begin with what is missing. Like every member of the order Squaliformes, the little gulper shark has no anal fin, and that single absence rules out the catsharks, houndsharks and requiem sharks at a glance. In their place are two dorsal fins, each preceded by a stout grooved spine, the first fin short and set behind a slightly humped back, the second nearly as tall as the first.
Then look at the head. The snout is long, flattened and bluntly pointed, and the eyes are very large and, in a fresh specimen, a striking luminous green, the effect of a reflective layer behind the retina that recycles the last of the light at 400 m. The mouth is a wide, almost straight slot with short labial furrows. The teeth differ sharply between jaws: small and blade-like above, much larger, broader and strongly angled below, so the lower jaw does the cutting.
Two finer characters separate it from its relatives, and both need a hand lens. The dermal denticles on the flank are blunt, flat and block-like, sitting almost flush with the skin rather than standing on a stalk as they do in several other gulper sharks. The pectoral fins end in long, free, pointed rear tips that reach back past the first dorsal spine. Colour is an unhelpful grey-brown above, paler below, with no markings beyond dusky fin edges.
How big does the little gulper shark get?
Small, as the name promises. The maximum reliably recorded total length is 110 cm (3 ft 7 in), and the heaviest published weight is 7.3 kg (16 lb), which is the mass of a large housecat spread over a metre of shark. Most animals landed by deep-water fisheries are shorter than 90 cm.
What makes the species remarkable is not the adult size but the size of the newborn. A little gulper pup measures 40 to 50 cm at birth, close to half its mother's length. Very few sharks of any kind invest so much in a single offspring, and the arithmetic of a 50 cm pup inside an 85 cm female explains why the litter is almost always one.
Maturity comes late in the growth curve. Females are mature at about 75 to 89 cm and males at roughly 81 to 94 cm, so an adult of either sex has completed around three-quarters of its possible growth before it breeds for the first time. On the size bar below, a full-grown little gulper barely reaches a diver's hip, a reasonable reminder that most sharks in the sea are this size or smaller.
Where little gulper sharks live
Two answers are needed here, because the range on the map and the range a taxonomist would defend are not the same thing. Records under the name Centrophorus uyato come from the Mediterranean, where Rafinesque described the species in 1810, from the eastern Atlantic slope off Spain, Gibraltar, Senegal, the Gulf of Guinea and south to Namibia and the Cape, from the Gulf of Mexico in the western Atlantic, and from the Indian Ocean off Mozambique and India, with unconfirmed reports as far east as Taiwan.
The caution is that Centrophorus is one of the most confused genera among sharks. The species has repeatedly been merged with, and split from, the larger gulper shark, and several recent revisions argue that many records from outside the Mediterranean belong to other members of the genus. Treat the wider distribution as provisional; the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic material is the solid core.
The habitat itself is not in doubt. This is a bottom-associated shark of the outer shelf and upper continental slope, recorded between about 50 and 1,400 m and most often caught between 200 and 600 m, over mud and rock where the slope steepens. It lives in permanently dark, cold, high-pressure water, and it does not come up: there is no seasonal inshore movement and no record of one in shallow coastal water.
What little gulper sharks eat
Stomachs from trawl-caught specimens hold deep-water bony fish first, cephalopods second and crustaceans third. The fish are the animals of the slope and the deep scattering layer: lanternfish, small hake and grenadiers, whatever the shark can overtake. The squid are mostly small and soft-bodied.
The family name is a description of the hunting method. Gulper sharks have an unusually distensible mouth and pharynx, and they feed by suction as much as by biting, expanding the throat to draw a fish in whole rather than tearing pieces from it. That is why a metre-long shark can swallow prey a shark of similar size with rigid jaws could not handle, and why the lower teeth, which are far larger than the upper ones, work as a cutting blade only when the meal has to be reduced first.
In water without light, finding the meal matters more than catching it. The huge eyes work on the faint bioluminescence of the shark's own prey, and the ampullae of Lorenzini on the snout close the last few centimetres by reading the electrical field of a muscle twitch. Sustained chases are unaffordable at these depths, where food is scarce, so the little gulper shark is built to cruise slowly and strike once.
Behaviour and life on the slope
Nobody has watched this shark alive in its own habitat for more than the minutes a research submersible can spare, so behaviour has to be read from what comes up in nets. Catches are strongly sorted: a single haul often brings up animals of one sex and a narrow size range, which means the population separates itself along the slope by sex and maturity, a pattern shared with most deep-water dogfishes.
The defining adaptation is the liver. A little gulper shark has no swim bladder, and at 500 m a body of muscle and cartilage sinks. The answer is an enormous liver, up to a quarter of body weight, loaded with squalene, a hydrocarbon lighter than seawater, which brings the shark to almost exactly neutral buoyancy so it can hang in the water without swimming. That liver is also the reason the species has been hunted; squalene is valuable, and our page on what sharks are built from explains the rest of the weight-saving skeleton.
Everything else about the animal is slow. Cold water and scarce food mean a low metabolic rate, unhurried swimming and long intervals between meals. The dorsal spines are the only visible defence, and against the deep-water sleeper sharks and larger dogfishes that share the slope they are probably enough to make a small gulper an awkward mouthful.
Reproduction and lifespan
The little gulper shark is ovoviviparous, or in modern terms a yolk-sac viviparous species: the eggs hatch inside the mother and each embryo lives entirely on its own yolk supply until birth, with no placental connection and no supply of extra eggs to eat. The comparison with the other three modes is set out on our page about how sharks reproduce.
The litter is the headline. A female normally carries one pup, occasionally two, and delivers it at 40 to 50 cm. Gestation has never been timed in this species; in the closely related gulper sharks it is thought to run well over a year, and there is no evidence that females breed every year. Males mature at about 81 to 94 cm and females at 75 to 89 cm, both late in their growth.
No one has aged a little gulper shark. The vertebrae of deep-water dogfishes are poorly calcified and hard to read, and the dorsal spines, which can also be used, have not been studied for this species. Related gulper sharks that have been aged live for several decades and grow a few centimetres a year. A shark that matures near its maximum size, produces one pup at a time and may not breed annually has one of the slowest replacement rates of any vertebrate, which is the central fact of its conservation story and of the wider picture in how long sharks live.
Is the little gulper shark dangerous?
Not in any sense. The SharkSider database holds no incident attributed to this species, and there is no reason one could ever appear. A metre-long shark that lives hundreds of metres down on the continental slope has no contact with swimmers, surfers or scuba divers, whose deepest recreational limit is around 40 m, and its suction-feeding mouth is built to inhale a lanternfish, not to bite anything large.
The only hazard is the one every fisher knows: the two dorsal spines. They are stout, grooved and sharp, and a gulper shark thrashing on a deck can drive one into a hand. The wound is mechanical rather than venomous, unlike the mild venom carried by a spiny dogfish, but it is worth respecting. The species sits comfortably among the sharks on our list of the least dangerous sharks.
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 little gulper shark as Endangered in 2024, and of all the species on this site it is one of the clearest cases of a shark undone by its own liver. Squalene from gulper shark livers has been used in cosmetics, lubricants and vaccine adjuvants, and through the 1980s and 1990s directed deep-water fisheries in the north-eastern Atlantic and off southern Africa targeted the whole family for it. Trawlers and bottom longliners still take the species as bycatch across its range, and it has no value beyond the liver and cheap salted meat.
Deep-water gulper shark populations do not recover from that. Where fishing has been documented, declines of well over half in a few decades are normal, and with a single pup per litter and maturity near maximum size there is nothing in the life history to push back. The European Union has kept a zero catch limit for deep-sea sharks in its Atlantic waters since 2010, which helps where it applies, but the Mediterranean, West African and Indian Ocean parts of the range have no comparable protection.
The species is not listed on CITES or the Convention on Migratory Species, so international trade in its oil is unregulated. Taxonomic confusion within Centrophorus makes matters worse: catch statistics that lump several species together hide which one is actually disappearing. The broader problem is described on our page on why sharks are endangered.
Relatives and look-alikes
The genus Centrophorus holds roughly a dozen species and they are genuinely hard to separate, which is why so many museum specimens have been relabelled. The gulper shark is the species most often confused with this one; it is larger, reaching about 1.6 m, and the two have been treated as the same animal by several authors. The leafscale gulper shark is named for its leaf-shaped, stalked denticles, the opposite of the little gulper's flat blocks. Australia's dumb gulper shark and smallfin gulper shark and the blackfin gulper shark of the western Pacific complete the group of close relatives, along with the aptly named dwarf gulper shark.
Beyond the family, the sharks hauled up alongside it are the other squaliform dogfishes of the slope: the Portuguese dogfish, which lives deeper and lacks dorsal spines, the kitefin shark, with its thick lips and huge cutting lower teeth, and the birdbeak dogfish, easily told by its extremely long, narrow snout.
- Gulper Sharkspecies profile
- Leafscale Gulper Sharkspecies profile
- Dumb Gulper Sharkspecies profile
- Smallfin Gulper Sharkspecies profile
- Blackfin Gulper Sharkspecies profile
- Dwarf Gulper Sharkspecies profile
Frequently asked questions
What is a little gulper shark?
A small deep-water dogfish, Centrophorus uyato, in the family Centrophoridae. It reaches about 110 cm, lives on continental slopes between roughly 50 and 1,400 m, and has no anal fin, a spine in front of each dorsal fin, a long pointed snout and very large green eyes. The IUCN lists it as Endangered.
How big do little gulper sharks get?
The maximum recorded total length is 110 cm (3 ft 7 in) and the heaviest published weight is 7.3 kg. Most animals landed are under 90 cm. Pups are born at 40 to 50 cm, nearly half their mother's length. Females mature at about 75 to 89 cm and males at roughly 81 to 94 cm.
Where do little gulper sharks live?
They are recorded from the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic from Iberia and Senegal south to Namibia and the Cape, the Gulf of Mexico, and parts of the Indian Ocean off Mozambique and India. They stay near the bottom of the outer shelf and upper slope, between about 50 and 1,400 m, most often below 200 m.
What do little gulper sharks eat?
Deep-water bony fish such as lanternfish, small hake and grenadiers come first, then squid, then crustaceans. They feed partly by suction, expanding a highly distensible mouth and throat to draw prey in whole. Their much larger lower teeth work as a cutting blade when a meal is too big to swallow in one piece.
Why is it called a gulper shark?
Because of how it feeds. Gulper sharks have an unusually expandable mouth and pharynx and can suck prey in whole, effectively gulping it, which lets them take food larger than sharks of similar size with rigid jaws. The name applies to the whole family Centrophoridae, and this species is one of the smaller members.
How do little gulper sharks reproduce?
They are ovoviviparous: the eggs hatch inside the mother and each embryo lives on its own yolk until birth, with no placenta. A female normally carries a single pup, occasionally two, and gives birth at 40 to 50 cm. Gestation has never been timed but is thought to exceed a year in this genus.
Are little gulper sharks dangerous to humans?
No. The species lives hundreds of metres down, far below any diver, and has a mouth built to inhale small fish. No incident has ever been attributed to it and none appears in the SharkSider database. The only real hazard is the sharp spine in front of each dorsal fin, which can injure a hand on deck.
Why is the little gulper shark endangered?
Its liver. Gulper shark livers are rich in squalene, used in cosmetics and industry, and directed deep-water fisheries plus trawl and longline bycatch have removed large numbers across its range. With usually one pup per litter and maturity close to maximum size, the species replaces losses far too slowly to recover.
How long do little gulper sharks live?
It has never been measured. No ageing study exists for the species, because deep-water dogfish vertebrae calcify poorly and are difficult to read. Related gulper sharks that have been aged live for several decades and grow only a few centimetres a year, so a lifespan of many decades is likely but unproven.
How do you tell a little gulper shark from other gulper sharks?
The best characters are microscopic. Its dermal denticles are blunt, flat and block-like, lying almost flush with the skin, whereas the leafscale gulper shark has leaf-shaped denticles on stalks. It is also smaller than the gulper shark, reaching 110 cm against about 1.6 m, with pectoral fins whose free rear tips reach past the first dorsal spine.
References
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 14, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.
