Scientists have recorded the first confirmed live footage of a goblin shark in its natural deep-sea habitat, drawing from two independent sets of video captured years apart in the Pacific Ocean. One recording came from a 2019 remotely operated vehicle dive near Jarvis Island, a remote atoll in the central Pacific. The other was collected by a baited bottom-lander deployed on the slope of the Tonga Trench during a 2024 expedition. A peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Fish Biology formally documents both observations as the first in-situ records of Mitsukurina owstoni, a species previously known almost entirely from dead or dying specimens pulled up in fishing nets.
Two Pacific sightings reshape what scientists know about goblin sharks
Goblin sharks have long occupied a peculiar blind spot in marine biology. The species was first described in 1898, yet for more than a century nearly every scientific observation relied on animals caught incidentally by deep-water trawlers or longliners. Those specimens, often damaged and discolored, offered limited insight into how the shark behaves, moves, or feeds in its actual environment. The new footage changes that calculus by placing living goblin sharks in a specific ecological context for the first time.
The two sightings occurred at locations separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean, yet they share a telling geographic feature. Jarvis Island rises steeply from the deep Pacific seafloor, and the Tonga Trench is one of the planet’s most dramatic bathymetric drop-offs. Both sites feature sharp transitions from relatively shallow island or ridge crests down to abyssal depths. That pattern suggests goblin sharks may preferentially inhabit steep, island-adjacent slopes rather than the flat abyssal plains that cover most of the deep ocean floor. If that hypothesis holds, future ROV surveys could target similar underwater terrain around other central Pacific islands and seamounts to find additional populations.
The Jarvis Island footage was captured during the 2019 E/V Nautilus field season, which included exploration around the Palmyra corridor. NOAA Ocean Exploration supported that season’s operations. The specific dive was logged as cruise NA110, and the video was recorded using the Little Hercules ROV. Observation data from that cruise are now archived in the NOAA National Database for Deep-Sea Corals and Sponges, accessible through the agency’s NA110 dashboard.
Tonga Trench expedition and the peer-reviewed record
The second set of footage came from a different research program entirely. Inkfish, a scientific organization, conducted a 2024 expedition in Tonga’s waters and deployed baited bottom-landers along the slope of the Tonga Trench. During that deployment, a goblin shark appeared on camera, providing the second independent observation. Inkfish later presented findings from the expedition to Tongan officials, lending government-level recognition to the scientific work.
The Journal of Fish Biology paper treats both the 2019 Nautilus footage and the 2024 Tonga Trench recording as co-equal evidence. By combining archived ROV video with newer lander data, the researchers built a case that goblin sharks can be observed alive in the wild when the right equipment is placed in the right terrain. The study formally classifies both events as the first in-situ observations of Mitsukurina owstoni, a designation that distinguishes them from earlier anecdotal reports or brief surface encounters with moribund animals.
The fact that the 2019 footage sat in NOAA’s archive for several years before being recognized as a goblin shark sighting raises a practical question about how much undiscovered biological data already exists in deep-sea video libraries. Thousands of hours of ROV footage from NOAA and other agencies remain only partially annotated. Systematic re-review of that material, guided by the habitat preferences suggested by these two sightings, could turn up additional records.
NOAA’s deep-sea video and biological archives are designed to be accessible to outside researchers and the public. Scientists who want to learn more about the Jarvis Island dive, or inquire about other unexamined material, can reach out through NOAA’s contact portal for the National Database for Deep-Sea Corals and Sponges. That kind of engagement may prove critical for uncovering further rare-species observations hidden in existing data.
What the footage does not yet reveal about Mitsukurina owstoni
For all the significance of seeing a living goblin shark in its habitat, the available record leaves major questions open. Neither the published paper nor the expedition logs released so far include exact depth readings, water temperature data, or detailed behavioral timestamps from the footage. Without those specifics, researchers cannot yet determine whether the two sharks were occupying comparable depth bands or responding to similar environmental conditions.
No direct statements or interview transcripts from the observing scientists have appeared in the publicly accessible NOAA cruise dashboards or the Tongan government briefing. That limits the ability to assess what the researchers themselves concluded about the shark’s behavior on camera, whether it was feeding, transiting, or reacting to the equipment. The videos confirm presence and basic body posture but stop short of revealing a full behavioral repertoire.
Population estimates remain entirely absent. Two independent encounters, even when separated by years and geography, cannot establish how many goblin sharks occupy the central Pacific or whether the species is common along trench and seamount slopes. The footage also does not clarify whether goblin sharks form loose aggregations around particular features or move as solitary hunters through broader home ranges.
Key life-history traits remain speculative. The observations do not reveal anything about mating behavior, pupping grounds, or juvenile habitats. No young-of-the-year animals were reported in the available material, and without repeat sightings of identifiable individuals, growth rates and longevity remain inferred from dead specimens rather than measured in living sharks.
Why in-situ footage matters for deep-sea conservation
Even with those gaps, the new records carry weight for conservation and management. Deep-sea fisheries and seabed mining interests increasingly target slopes and trenches that resemble the Jarvis Island and Tonga Trench settings. Knowing that goblin sharks use these habitats gives regulators and regional bodies a concrete reason to consider the species when evaluating industrial proposals.
In-situ footage can also refine how environmental impact assessments are conducted. If goblin sharks favor steep slopes near island margins, baseline surveys in proposed development areas may need to include ROV or lander deployments at comparable depths and terrain. Without that targeted effort, rare apex or mesopredators could be overlooked, leading to underestimates of ecosystem complexity and vulnerability.
The sightings further underscore the value of long-term public investment in ocean exploration. The Jarvis Island record emerged from a government-supported cruise whose primary objectives did not center on goblin sharks, and yet it yielded a globally significant biological observation that only became apparent years later. That kind of serendipitous discovery depends on sustained funding, open data policies, and careful archiving.
Next steps for goblin shark research
Researchers now face a clear set of priorities. One is to locate and analyze the highest-quality versions of the 2019 and 2024 videos, extracting as much environmental metadata as possible. Even approximate depth, current direction, and background fauna could help narrow hypotheses about goblin shark foraging strategies and vertical distribution.
Another priority is to design future expeditions that explicitly target goblin shark habitat. That might mean placing baited landers along multiple points of a trench slope, or programming ROV transects to follow contour lines where steep topography meets midwater currents. Repeated deployments in the same area could reveal whether goblin sharks return predictably to favored locations, hinting at territoriality or site fidelity.
Collaboration across institutions will be essential. The combination of a NOAA archive record and a privately organized expedition in Tonga demonstrates that no single program is likely to capture the full picture of a rarely seen deep-sea animal. Shared protocols for annotating video, cross-referencing sightings, and depositing data in accessible repositories could accelerate progress not only for goblin sharks but for other elusive species.
For now, the two confirmed in-situ records mark a turning point. After more than a century of knowing goblin sharks mostly as damaged specimens hauled from the depths, scientists can finally point to images of these animals alive in the dark, moving through the steep underwater landscapes they appear to favor. The footage is brief and incomplete, but it anchors future research in real habitats rather than inferences drawn solely from the dead.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
