Zebra Shark

Because its pattern changes dramatically as it grows. A newly hatched zebra shark and small juveniles are marked with bold, contrasting dark and pale vertical stripes, genuinely resembling a zebra, which is thought to help camouflage the vulnerable young among light and shadow on the reef or possibly to mimic banded sea snakes as a deterrent to predators. As the shark matures over its first couple of years, those stripes gradually break apart into a scattered pattern of dark spots on a lighter tan or yellowish background, much closer to a leopard's coat, and adults are usually called "leopard sharks" in regions where that name does not already belong to the unrelated Triakis semifasciata found off California, which is why "zebra shark" is preferred as a less ambiguous common name.

No, it is considered one of the most harmless and approachable of all sharks. It has small, weak jaws suited to sucking and crushing small prey rather than biting large animals, it is naturally slow and placid, and it rests motionless on the seabed for long periods, allowing divers to approach closely. In several popular dive destinations, zebra sharks have become accustomed to divers and snorkellers and will accept hand-feeding, and there are no significant records of unprovoked zebra shark attacks on people. Like any wild animal, however, it should not be grabbed or restrained, since a startled shark can react defensively.

Yes, in more than one way. Captive female zebra sharks that have been isolated from males for years have been documented laying fertile eggs that hatched into pups, and genetic testing in some of these cases identified the process as parthenogenesis, virgin-birth-style asexual reproduction with no paternal genetic contribution at all. Separately, and more central to its normal biology, zebra sharks are also known to store sperm from a single mating internally and use it over an extended period to fertilise successive batches of eggs, so a female need not mate again for each clutch. Both abilities make the species notable among sharks for reproductive flexibility.

Its huge geographic range across the Indo-West Pacific masks steep, uneven declines. In much of Southeast Asia, one of the most intensively fished marine regions in the world, zebra sharks are caught both deliberately, for their fins, meat, and liver oil, and incidentally as bycatch in nets and trawls set for other species, and because they are slow-growing, late-maturing bottom dwellers that do not move around as widely as many open-ocean sharks, local populations can be fished down quickly with little chance of being replenished from elsewhere. Populations have consequently collapsed or vanished in parts of that region, even as reasonably healthy numbers persist in better-protected waters such as parts of Australia, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Gulf, which is why the global assessment moved to Endangered despite the species not being rare everywhere.