Silky Shark

The Silky Shark is a slender, wide-ranging pelagic requiem shark found in warm open-ocean waters throughout the tropics. It belongs to family Carcharhinidae and gets its common name from its unusually smooth, fine-textured skin. Adults typically reach 2.1-2.5 meters. As one of the most abundant pelagic sharks worldwide, it is frequently encountered around offshore structures, seamounts, and drifting objects, and is commonly associated with schools of tuna. Due to high rates of incidental catch in commercial fisheries and slow reproduction, the Silky Shark is currently assessed as Vulnerable, with some regional populations classified as more severely depleted.

• Slender, streamlined dark gray to bronze body with notably smooth, silky skin texture
• Long, narrow, pointed snout and relatively small eyes
• Long, sickle-shaped, narrow pectoral fins
• Low, rounded first dorsal fin with its origin set well behind the pectoral fin rear tips
• Fin tips often subtly dusky rather than boldly marked The smooth skin texture combined with the far-back first dorsal fin origin distinguishes it from similar oceanic species such as the Galapagos and Dusky Sharks.

Silky Sharks are a highly pelagic species found throughout tropical and warm-temperate oceans worldwide, typically in open water near the edge of continental shelves, around seamounts, and near drifting flotsam or fish-aggregating devices. They generally occupy the upper water column from the surface to about 500 meters, favoring warmer water above 23 degrees Celsius. Unlike strictly coastal requiem sharks, they rarely enter shallow inshore waters, instead ranging widely across open ocean basins, often traveling alongside schools of tuna and other pelagic fish.

Silky Sharks are active, curious oceanic predators often seen circling near floating objects and fish-aggregating devices, where they feed on schooling fish, squid, and other pelagic prey. They are known to associate closely with tuna schools, sometimes complicating commercial tuna fishing operations due to high incidental catch rates. They can display an agonistic hunched-back threat posture similar to reef sharks when threatened. Reproduction is viviparous, with females producing litters of roughly 2-14 pups annually or biennially after a gestation of about 12 months, with pupping occurring in open ocean nursery zones.