Longnose Pygmy Shark

• Maximum lengthAbout 37 cm (15 in); FishBase lists 29 cm
• WeightNever recorded; a few tens of grams
• LifespanUnknown; no specimen has been aged
• Depth rangeSurface to about 500 m (1,650 ft)
• DietSmall open-ocean fish and invertebrates
• IUCN statusLeast Concern

How to recognise a longnose pygmy shark

Start with the head, because it is the feature the name refers to and the one that separates this shark from every other dwarf species in the ocean. The snout is long, bulbous and conical, and it takes up roughly half the total length of the head before narrowing to a blunt point. Behind it sit small, round eyes — popular accounts describe them as large, but the published field marks for the genus say otherwise — and a transverse mouth with thin, smooth lips and skin flaps over the nostrils.

The body is slim and slightly compressed from side to side, dark chocolate brown, with conspicuously pale, almost translucent margins on the fins. There are two dorsal fins and neither carries a spine, which rules out the lanternsharks and the dogfishes; unusually, the second dorsal is the larger of the two. The pectoral fins are short and paddle-shaped, and the tail has a well-developed lower lobe and a deep notch near the tip of the upper one.

Turn the animal over and the last character is unmistakable. The whole underside is covered in minute photophores — light-producing organs packed into the skin — which give a preserved specimen a finely stippled appearance under magnification. The teeth complete the picture: about 22 rows of tiny upper teeth for gripping, and around 23 rows of much larger, broad, knife-like lower teeth that interlock into a single cutting blade.

How big is a longnose pygmy shark?

Tiny, even by the standards of dwarf sharks. Published maxima differ slightly because so few animals have ever been measured: FishBase gives 29 cm as the largest recorded specimen, while the shark literature more often cites a maximum close to 37 cm (15 in). Either figure puts this species among the very smallest sharks alive, in the company of the animals on our list of the smallest shark species.

A full-grown longnose pygmy shark would sit comfortably along a forearm. Weight has never been published, and there is little to publish: a slim fish of 30-odd centimetres with a large oily liver and no heavy musculature weighs a few tens of grams.

Size at maturity is reported at roughly 33 cm for males and a little more for females, which would mean the species matures within a few centimetres of its maximum length. That is normal for a dwarf shark, but here it also collides with the smaller published maximum, and the honest reading is that the sample is far too small to settle the question. Nothing is known about the size of newborns, because no pregnant female has been described in detail.

Where longnose pygmy sharks live

The records are scattered across three oceans and add up to very few animals. The best-known come from the western Indian Ocean off Durban and the KwaZulu-Natal coast of South Africa, where the species was first described. Others come from the south-east Atlantic, over the deep water of the Walvis Ridge off Namibia and towards the mid-ocean islands, and from the south-east Pacific off Chile.

That pattern suggests a genuinely oceanic animal with a wide southern-hemisphere distribution rather than three separate populations, and the gaps on the map are almost certainly gaps in collecting rather than gaps in the range. Nobody trawls the open ocean looking for a 30 cm shark.

Depth records run from the surface down to about 500 m (1,650 ft). Combine that with photophores on the belly and the picture is of a vertical migrator: an animal that spends daylight in the dim mesopelagic zone and rises towards the surface at night, the same pattern followed by most of the small oceanic sharks described in our guide to where sharks live. It has no association with the seabed at all.

What longnose pygmy sharks eat

No stomach contents have been published in any detail, so what follows is careful inference rather than observation, and it deserves to be labelled as such. The species is assumed to feed on the small animals of the open water column: lanternfish and other small mesopelagic fish, squid, and planktonic crustaceans.

The dentition supports that reading, but with a twist. Tiny gripping teeth above and a solid interlocking blade below is the arrangement found throughout the kitefin shark family, and in its most extreme form it belongs to the cookiecutter shark, which uses it to gouge plugs of flesh out of tuna, dolphins and whales. Whether the longnose pygmy shark does anything similar has never been shown; no bite mark has been attributed to it and no specimen has been caught in the act. What can be said is that the equipment for cutting a piece out of something larger is there.

At this size the animal is also prey. Tuna, billfish, larger sharks and squid all feed in the same water, and a shark you could hold in one hand has no defence except darkness and the countershading of its own light organs.

Glowing in the dark and other guesswork

The one behaviour we can speak about with confidence is the light. The photophores that cover the underside of a longnose pygmy shark almost certainly serve counterillumination: the shark matches the faint downwelling daylight above it, so that a predator looking up from below sees no silhouette against the surface. It is the standard solution among small open-ocean sharks, and it is described in our piece on bioluminescent sharks.

Everything else is inference. The small eyes suggest that sight is not the sense this shark leads with. The long bulbous snout carries the electroreceptive ampullae of Lorenzini and a dense lateral line field, both of which work in complete darkness. The flabby body and large liver point to near-neutral buoyancy and a slow, hovering style of swimming rather than pursuit.

Whether it schools, whether it migrates seasonally, whether males and females separate — none of that is known, because the total number of specimens ever collected would fit in a single crate. This is one of the species where the honest page is the short one, and where a confident description of daily behaviour would simply be invented. Compare it with a well-studied dwarf species such as the dwarf lanternshark and the difference in what we know is stark.

Reproduction and lifespan

The longnose pygmy shark is believed to be aplacental viviparous, the mode in which eggs are retained inside the mother, each embryo lives on its own yolk sac, and the pups are born fully formed. That is the reproductive mode of every other member of the kitefin shark family, and there is no reason to think this species differs — but it should be stated as an expectation rather than a finding, because no fully documented pregnant female has been described. The alternatives are set out in our guide to the ways sharks reproduce.

Litter size is reported only as "very few". In related dwarf sharks the number is typically between two and ten, and a shark of 30 cm cannot carry many embryos whatever its mode of reproduction. The size of newborns is unrecorded, and so is the length of gestation.

Age and growth have never been studied. Dalatiid sharks have no dorsal fin spines to section, and their vertebrae are poorly calcified, which makes them among the hardest sharks in the world to age — the difficulties are explained in our article on how long sharks live. Nobody has aged a single longnose pygmy shark, so the lifespan of this species is unknown, and any figure quoted elsewhere is a guess.

Are longnose pygmy sharks dangerous?

No. This is a shark you could hold in the palm of your hand, living in open ocean water hundreds of kilometres from any coast and usually well below the surface during daylight. There is no record of a longnose pygmy shark encountering a person at all, let alone injuring one.

Nor is there any realistic way for that to change. The species lives in oceanic water beyond the continental shelves, spends the daylight hours in the mesopelagic zone hundreds of metres down, and rises only into open water far offshore at night. Nobody swims there, and a shark of this size could not break skin through a wetsuit even if it tried.

The only theoretical caveat is the family it belongs to. Kitefin sharks include the cookiecutter shark, which has occasionally bitten long-distance swimmers at night in the open Pacific, and the longnose pygmy shark shares its basic jaw design. But the cookiecutter grows to about 50 cm, has a far more specialised suctorial mouth, and is genuinely abundant in warm oceanic water; none of that applies here. Nothing in the record connects this species to a single incident anywhere, and it belongs among the least dangerous sharks without qualification.

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 longnose pygmy shark as Least Concern. That assessment rests less on good population data than on the absence of a threat: the species has been recorded in three ocean basins, it lives in open water away from continental shelves, and there is no fishery anywhere that targets it or takes it in meaningful numbers.

The handful of specimens that exist came mostly from research trawls, from midwater sampling and from stranded or beach-cast animals. A shark of 30 cm passes straight through the mesh of a commercial pelagic net, and there is no market for it if one is caught. The species is not listed on any CITES appendix, and no national legislation names it.

None of that makes it secure in an absolute sense; it makes it unmeasured. A species known from so few animals could decline substantially before anybody noticed, and the open-ocean habitat it occupies is changing in oxygen content and temperature in ways that will affect the mesopelagic fish it probably eats. Least Concern here means "no evidence of a problem", which is not the same as evidence of no problem — a distinction worth holding on to when reading our overview of why sharks are endangered.

Similar species and close relatives

Heteroscymnoides contains this species alone. Its relatives are the other dwarf members of the kitefin shark family, and telling them apart comes down to the snout and the fins.

The pygmy shark is the closest match in size and habits but has a much shorter, less bulbous snout and a first dorsal fin set far back. The spined pygmy shark and the smalleye pygmy shark are smaller still — among the smallest sharks known — and both carry a small spine on the first dorsal fin, which the longnose pygmy shark does not.

The taillight shark is another rarely seen southern dalatiid, distinguished by the luminous gland on its belly, and the cookiecutter shark and kitefin shark are the large members of the family, at roughly 50 cm and 1.6 m respectively. If you have a small dark shark with a bulbous half-head snout, pale fin edges and no fin spines, there is only one candidate.

• Pygmy Sharkspecies profile
• Spined Pygmy Sharkspecies profile
• Smalleye Pygmy Sharkspecies profile
• Taillight Sharkspecies profile
• Cookiecutter Sharkspecies profile
• Kitefin 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 November 9, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.