Pink Lanternshark

• Maximum lengthAbout 41 cm (16 in)
• WeightNot recorded; probably under 0.5 kg (1 lb)
• LifespanUnknown; no ageing study exists
• Depth range700–880 m (2,300–2,900 ft)
• DietPresumed small squid, shrimps and lanternfish (no stomach study)
• IUCN statusLeast Concern (assessed 2015)

How to recognise a pink lanternshark

The name is the first clue, and it is accurate. Freshly caught, the back and flanks of this shark are a washed-out rose pink rather than the brown or slate grey of most lanternsharks, because the skin is thin and only lightly pigmented and the blood beneath shows through. The colour fades in preservative, which is one reason the species went unrecognised until Peter Last, George Burgess and Bernard Séret described it in 2002; the name dianthus is the genus of the garden pink.

Below the pink, the underside is abruptly black. That dark belly is not pigment for its own sake but a dense field of photophores, the light organs that give the family its name. A black flank mark sits above and behind each pelvic fin, with a short branch pointing forward and a longer one running back along the tail stalk, and there are dark patches on the pelvic fins, the base of the tail and the tip of the upper tail lobe. The rest of the body is stout for a lanternshark, with a short blunt snout, large green-reflecting eyes and a coat of fine, bristle-like denticles that feel like velvet rubbed the wrong way.

The fins settle the family. There are two dorsal fins, each preceded by a grooved spine; the first is small with a short spine, the second is noticeably larger with a longer spine, the opposite of what the old version of this page claimed. There is no anal fin, which separates every lanternshark and dogfish from the catsharks that share their depths. The nearest look-alikes are the other small Etmopterus species of the region, told apart by the exact shape of the flank mark and the arrangement of the denticles, a job for a specialist with the animal in hand.

How big is a pink lanternshark?

Small, even by the standards of a family that contains the tiniest sharks on earth. The largest pink lanternshark on record is a male of about 41 cm (16 in) total length; the old page's "1.3 feet" is the same figure rounded. Adult males in the type series measured around 33 to 34 cm, and the few females examined were of similar size, so if the sexes differ it is by a few centimetres, with females probably the larger, as in other lanternsharks. Nobody has weighed one and published the result; a 40 cm shark of this build would be well under half a kilogram.

Newborns are thought to be 9 to 10 cm (3.5 to 4 in) long, the size at which the smallest free-swimming specimens have been taken and the size of the largest embryos. That puts the pink lanternshark in the same bracket as the dwarf lanternshark of the Caribbean, which vies for the title of the world's smallest shark on our list of the ten smallest shark species, though the pink lanternshark grows a little larger. For comparison, the largest members of the family, such as the great lanternshark of the North Atlantic, reach 75 cm and more. The size bar below sets the 41 cm maximum against a diver, and it is a reminder that a shark need not be big to be a shark.

Where pink lanternsharks live

The pink lanternshark has one of the smallest known ranges of any shark. All confirmed specimens come from the south-west Pacific: the upper continental slope off Queensland in the Coral Sea, off north-eastern Australia, and the slopes and seamounts around New Caledonia, including the Norfolk Ridge that runs south towards Lord Howe Island. Whether the two areas are connected by a continuous population across the deep Coral Sea, or the shark also lives on the many unsurveyed ridges of the Tasman Sea, is unknown; deep-water survey effort in the region has been sparse and much of it took place in the same few cruises that produced the type specimens.

Vertically it is a slope animal, not a shelf one: recorded depths run from about 700 to 880 m (2,300 to 2,900 ft), on or just above the bottom. At those depths off Queensland and New Caledonia the water is a constant 5 to 7 °C and completely dark apart from the faint blue glow of other animals, which is the environment the family's photophores evolved for. There is no evidence of the seasonal or daily vertical movements that some lanternsharks make, but equally nobody has looked. No SharkSider country guide yet lists the species, because it lives beyond the reach of the coastal surveys those guides draw on.

What pink lanternsharks eat

No stomach-content study has been published for the pink lanternshark, and the old page's confident list, which included worms and cartilaginous fish, was borrowed from other species. What can be said with confidence comes from its anatomy and its relatives. The mouth is small and set under the snout, the upper teeth are multi-cusped and made for gripping, and the lower teeth form a continuous cutting edge of overlapping blades, the standard lanternshark arrangement for seizing soft-bodied prey and shearing off a mouthful.

Lanternsharks whose diets have been studied, such as the velvet belly lanternshark of the eastern Atlantic and the blackbelly lanternshark of southern Australia, eat small squid, krill and other shrimps, and the lanternfish and bristlemouths that make up the deep scattering layer. A 40 cm shark with a small mouth will take the smaller end of that menu. The likely method is a slow patrol just above the bottom, guided by smell and by the ampullae of Lorenzini on the snout, with a short lunge at anything that betrays itself. In several lanternsharks the photophores on the belly are thought to double as a lure or to light the way for a shark hunting in a group, and the pink lanternshark's black, photophore-rich underside suggests the same equipment is in use, though nobody has watched it feed.

Behaviour, senses and the glow

Everything about this shark's behaviour is inferred, because it has never been observed alive in its habitat. The family, though, is well enough studied to say what it almost certainly does. Lanternsharks are bioluminescent: the photophores on the belly and lower flanks produce a steady blue-green light that matches the faint down-welling glow from the surface, so that a predator looking up from below sees no silhouette. The dark flank marks are photophore-rich too, and in relatives their pattern is species-specific, which suggests the sharks use it to recognise each other and to keep together in the dark. The light is switched on and off by hormones rather than nerves, over minutes rather than seconds.

The eyes are large and backed by a reflective layer that returns light through the retina, the same adaptation that makes a cat's eyes shine, and they are tuned to the blue wavelengths of both daylight remnants and other animals' glow. Behind each eye is a spiracle, a small opening that draws water to the gills when the mouth is busy (see what spiracles do). Denticles and fin spines are the passive defences: the dorsal spines make a mouthful of lanternshark uncomfortable for the larger sharks, such as the kitefin shark, and the big bony fish that share the slope, and the pale pink coloration, unhelpful as camouflage in daylight, is invisible at 800 m where red light does not reach. Whether the pink lanternshark aggregates by sex or size, as trawl catches of other lanternsharks suggest they do, is one more open question.

Reproduction and lifespan

Lanternsharks are ovoviviparous, or yolk-sac viviparous: the eggs are retained in the mother's uterus, the embryos hatch there and grow on the yolk of their own egg, and the pups are born fully formed. Nothing suggests the pink lanternshark departs from this pattern, and the ovoviviparous sharks page explains it further. Beyond that, the record is thin. Males mature at roughly 33 to 34 cm, judged from the calcified claspers of the type series. Female maturity, litter size, gestation, birth season and nursery areas have not been recorded for the species; relatives of the same size carry litters of 6 to 20 pups and are thought to be pregnant for a year or more, and the pink lanternshark is likely to fall in that range. Pups are about 9 to 10 cm at birth.

Age is equally unknown. Lanternsharks have been aged from the growth bands on their dorsal fin spines rather than their vertebrae, and the few results, for the velvet belly and a handful of others, suggest lifespans of around 10 to 20 years with maturity at several years old, slow going for so small an animal. No spine from a pink lanternshark has been sectioned. Until one is, the lifespan figures offered on other websites for this species are guesses, and our general page on how long sharks live is a better guide to what to expect from a deep-water dogfish of this size.

Is the pink lanternshark dangerous?

No, and it could not be. A 40 cm shark with a mouth barely wider than a thumb, living 700 m down on a slope hundreds of kilometres from any beach, has no way to meet a swimmer, let alone injure one. The SharkSider database, which holds bite records back to the sixteenth century, has nothing attributed to any lanternshark, and the Australian attack record is a story of white, tiger and bull sharks in shallow water, not of anything from the slope.

The only people who ever touch a pink lanternshark are the crew of research and deep-water trawl vessels, and the only hazard it presents is its two dorsal spines, which can give a sharp jab to an ungloved hand during sorting. Even that is rare. The animal is far more at risk from us than we are from it, and there is no reason to read our guide to surviving a shark attack on its account.

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 pink lanternshark as Least Concern, most recently in 2015. The reasoning is practical: almost no fishing takes place at 700 to 880 m in the Coral Sea or around New Caledonia, and the parts of its range off Queensland fall inside the Coral Sea Marine Park and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, where deep-water trawling is prohibited. In New Caledonian waters the Natural Park of the Coral Sea covers the whole exclusive economic zone. The species is not listed under CITES or the Convention on Migratory Species and has no specific protection of its own, nor does it need one at present.

The caveats are the ones that apply to every deep-sea shark. The population size is unknown, the range is small, and the animal is almost certainly slow to mature and slow to breed, so any future deep-water fishery for shrimps or slope fish that took lanternsharks as bycatch could drive a decline before anyone noticed. Lanternsharks have no commercial value, but they die in trawls all the same. The general problem is set out on our why sharks are endangered page; the pink lanternshark's good fortune is that its home is, for now, out of reach.

Similar species and close relatives

The genus Etmopterus holds around forty species and is still growing, with new lanternsharks named almost every year from deep-water surveys. The pink lanternshark belongs to the group around Etmopterus lucifer, the blackbelly lanternshark, whose members share the two-branched flank mark and small size. Its closest neighbours in the water are the blackbelly lanternshark of southern Australia and New Zealand, the southern lanternshark of the same southern slopes, and the splendid lanternshark of Japan and Taiwan, all brown or grey where the pink lanternshark is pink.

Further afield, the velvet belly lanternshark of the eastern Atlantic is the best-studied member of the family and the source of most of what is known about lanternshark glow, and the ninja lanternshark of the eastern Pacific, described in 2015, shows how much of the genus was found only recently. The dwarf lanternshark is smaller still. Outside the family, the pink lanternshark could be confused only with other small deep-water dogfishes such as the cookiecutter shark, which glows too but has a rounded snout and lives in open water rather than on the slope.

• Blackbelly Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Southern Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Splendid Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Velvet Belly Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Ninja Lanternsharkspecies profile
• Dwarf Lanternsharkspecies 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 10, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.