Whiskery Shark

• Maximum length1.6 m (5.2 ft); most adults 1.1–1.4 m
• WeightUp to about 13 kg (29 lb)
• LifespanAbout 15 years (oldest aged specimens)
• Depth rangeShoreline to 220 m (720 ft), mostly on the inner shelf
• DietOctopus above all; squid, cuttlefish, small fish, rock lobsters
• IUCN statusLeast Concern (assessed 2015)

How to recognise a whiskery shark

The barbels give it away. Each nostril carries a long, tapering flap of skin that hangs down like a whisker, and no other houndshark in Australian water has anything like it. Behind the head the back rises into a distinct hump, so that a whiskery shark in profile looks slightly hunched, with a short, rounded snout and horizontally oval eyes set high on the head and protected by a nictitating membrane. Fishers often pick it out of a catch by the hump before they notice the barbels.

The fins are large for the body. Both dorsal fins are tall with concave rear edges, the second nearly as big as the first, which is typical of the family Triakidae and separates the whiskery shark from requiem sharks, whose second dorsal is small. The tail has a weak lower lobe and a notch under the tip of the upper lobe.

Colour runs from grey to bronze-grey above and white below. Young sharks are marked with dark saddles and blotches along the back that fade with age, so a large adult is usually plain. The mouth is broadly arched, with long furrows at the corners, and holds around 24 to 32 rows of oblique, blade-like teeth in the upper jaw and 36 to 42 rows of narrower, upright-cusped teeth in the lower (see how shark teeth are counted). The nearest look-alikes are the gummy shark, which has white spots and no barbels, and the school shark, which is slimmer with a much longer upper tail lobe.

How big do whiskery sharks get?

A whiskery shark is a modest animal. The largest measured individuals are about 1.6 m (5.2 ft) long, and the heaviest published weight is roughly 13 kg (29 lb). Most adults taken in the Western Australian gillnet fishery are between 1.1 and 1.4 m and weigh 6 to 10 kg, which is why the species is marketed as a small, boneless "flake" fillet rather than as a trophy.

Pups are born at 22 to 27 cm (8.7–10.6 in), already carrying the barbels and the juvenile blotches. Growth is quick by shark standards: males mature at about 1.1 m when they are four to five years old, and females at close to 1.2 m at six to seven years. Females are slightly the larger sex, as in most houndsharks, but the difference is small and there is no reliable record of a female much beyond 1.6 m.

Anything hump-backed with barbels on the southern Australian shelf is a whiskery shark; anything much bigger with the same general shape is a school shark or a bronze whaler. The scale bar below compares that maximum with a 1.8 m diver.

Where whiskery sharks live

This is an Australian endemic in the strictest sense: every confirmed record comes from the temperate shelf of the southern half of the continent. The range runs from the North West Cape in Western Australia, south around Cape Leeuwin, along the Great Australian Bight and Victoria, to Wynyard on the north coast of Tasmania. The core of the population, and of the fishery, lies on the west and south coasts of Western Australia between Kalbarri and Albany, with Bass Strait at the eastern edge. It has never been recorded outside Australian waters.

Whiskery sharks are bottom-dwellers of the continental shelf. They are recorded from just below the surf line down to about 220 m (720 ft), but the great majority live in far shallower water, on and around the rocky limestone reefs, kelp beds and seagrass meadows where octopus are plentiful. The water they favour is cool-temperate, roughly 14 to 22 °C, and there is no evidence that they enter estuaries or tropical water.

Tagging in Western Australia shows that most individuals stay within a few tens of kilometres of where they were marked, though a minority travel several hundred kilometres along the coast. The range overlaps almost entirely with the gummy shark, the school shark and the Port Jackson shark; a single gillnet set often brings up all four.

What whiskery sharks eat

Few sharks are as narrowly specialised as this one. When Western Australian scientists examined the stomachs of sharks landed by the gillnet fleet in the late 1990s, octopus made up the great bulk of the diet by weight, far ahead of any other prey. Squid and cuttlefish came next, followed by small bottom fish such as leatherjackets, trevallies and wrasses, and occasional southern rock lobsters, crabs and marine worms. Strands of seagrass turn up too, but those are swallowed accidentally with prey that was hiding in the meadow. "Exclusively" octopus, as the species is sometimes described, overstates it; "overwhelmingly" is right.

The barbels explain how the hunting works. A whiskery shark swims slowly over reef and weed with its snout close to the bottom, dragging the two nasal flaps across the surface. They carry taste and touch receptors, and together with the ampullae of Lorenzini on the underside of the snout they let the shark find an octopus that is sitting motionless inside a crevice, colour-matched to the rock and invisible to the eye. Once found, the octopus is seized and swallowed; the upper teeth are angled for cutting and the lower for gripping, so the shark can shear a large animal into pieces.

Feeding is heaviest at night and in the early morning, when octopus leave their dens to hunt crabs. During the day the sharks rest in caves and under ledges, which is where divers on the south coast usually meet them.

Behaviour and senses

Whiskery sharks are slow, unhurried swimmers built for endurance rather than speed. The large dorsal and pectoral fins and the soft lower tail lobe are the fins of a shark that cruises close to the bottom and turns tightly among rocks, not one that chases fish in open water. They are not known to school, but they gather where octopus are dense, and gillnets catch them in patches.

Sight is relatively unimportant to an animal that hunts in kelp at night, and the eyes are small compared with those of open-water sharks. Smell, taste and touch matter far more. The barbels are the signature sense organ, and the shark constantly noses along the bottom in a way that resembles a nurse shark more than it does its own relatives. Like all houndsharks it has a nictitating membrane, a third eyelid that slides across the eye when the head is pushed into a crevice.

Movement is limited. Tag returns from Western Australia show that most sharks are recaptured close to their release point, some after several years, while a small proportion have moved between the west coast and the south coast. There is no long seasonal migration in the way that school sharks travel between Australia and New Zealand, though females do move into particular inshore areas to give birth in late winter and spring. Almost everything known about its behaviour comes from fishery sampling and a handful of diver observations.

Reproduction and lifespan

The whiskery shark is viviparous: embryos develop inside the mother, nourished first by their yolk and later through a yolk-sac placenta, and are born fully formed (see the four ways sharks reproduce). Mating takes place in August and September on the Western Australian coast. Gestation lasts seven to nine months, so the pups are born the following August to October, and females can be pregnant again almost immediately. In practice most are not: only about half of mature females carry embryos in any one year, so most breed every second year.

Litters range from 4 to 28 pups, with an average close to 19, and bigger females carry more. The pups measure 22 to 27 cm at birth and are dropped in shallow inshore water in the south-west, where they spend their first years among reef and seagrass before joining the adults.

Growth has been measured from vertebral rings. Males mature at roughly 1.1 m and four to five years of age, females at about 1.2 m and six to seven years, and the oldest sharks aged in the fishery were about 15 years old. That is a short life for a shark (the species is discussed on our shark lifespan page), and the combination of early maturity, large litters and a 15-year span means the population can rebuild in a decade or two when fishing pressure drops, which is exactly what happened in the 1990s.

Are whiskery sharks dangerous?

No. The SharkSider database, which draws on the Global Shark Attack File, contains no incident attributed to a whiskery shark, and there is no case in the Australian literature either. A shark of 1.2 m whose jaws are shaped for gripping octopus has neither the size nor the dentition to do serious harm, and it spends the daylight hours resting in caves rather than patrolling beaches. The many recorded bites in Australia belong to white, tiger, bull and wobbegong sharks, not to this one.

The only people who handle whiskery sharks regularly are commercial gillnet crews and recreational anglers, and even they report nothing worse than a thrashing fish. Divers who find one under a ledge can approach closely; the shark generally holds still, relying on its camouflage, then swims off along the bottom if pressed. Treat it as you would any wild animal with teeth, keep your hands away from the mouth when unhooking one, and it is harmless. Our general guide to shark encounters is written for far larger species.

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 and fisheries

The IUCN Red List assesses the whiskery shark as Least Concern, in an assessment published in 2015, and the trend is considered stable. That verdict rests on one of the better-documented recoveries in Australian shark fishing. Through the 1970s and early 1980s the species was heavily taken in the Western Australian demersal gillnet fisheries on the south and west coasts, and by the late 1980s the breeding stock had fallen to a fraction of its unfished size. Effort limits introduced from 1988, gear restrictions and tighter licensing through the 1990s allowed the population to rebuild, and stock assessments since the 2000s have placed it back above the target level.

Today the whiskery shark is a quota-managed target of the Joint Authority Southern Demersal and the West Coast Demersal gillnet and longline fisheries in Western Australia, and a minor bycatch of the Commonwealth gillnet sector in Bass Strait and off South Australia. Its flesh is sold as flake alongside gummy shark. Neither CITES nor the Convention on Migratory Species covers the family Triakidae, and the species has no national protection beyond fishery rules.

The remaining risks are the ones that face every endemic with a small range: a single management failure would affect the whole species, and warming of the south-western Australian shelf, one of the fastest-warming regions in the ocean, may squeeze a cool-temperate animal into a shrinking band of suitable water. For now it is one of the few sharks on our list of threatened sharks that can genuinely be called a success story.

Similar species and close relatives

Furgaleus holds a single species, so the whiskery shark's closest relatives are the other houndsharks of the family Triakidae, above all the Australian ones it lives beside. The gummy shark (Mustelus antarcticus) is the same size and shares the same reefs and the same fish market, but has a flat pavement of crushing teeth, white flecks along the back and no barbels. The school or tope shark (Galeorhinus galeus) is longer and more slender, with a big second lobe on the tail and a habit of long migrations. The spotted estuary smooth-hound of New Zealand and the banded houndshark of Japan are more distant cousins with the same fin plan.

Barbels are the trap. The Australian weasel shark is a different family altogether and lives in the tropical north, and the barbeled houndshark of West Africa is a third family again; neither overlaps the whiskery shark's range, so a barbelled houndshark from Perth, Esperance or Hobart can be only one thing. The common smooth-hound of Europe is included below as a familiar reference point for readers in the northern hemisphere.

• Gummy Sharkspecies profile
• Tope Sharkspecies profile
• Spotted Estuary Smooth-Houndspecies profile
• Banded Houndsharkspecies profile
• Common Smooth-Houndspecies profile
• Australian Weasel 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 2, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.