Fisherman Catches Two-Headed Baby Shark, Throws It Back

A fisherman recently caught a two-headed baby shark off India’s Maharashtra coast and tossed it back into the water but not before taking photos of the rare find.

“We do not eat such small fish, especially sharks, so I thought it was strange but decided to throw it anyway,” Nitin Patil told the Hindustan Times .

A fellow fisherman, Umesh Palekar, said: “We have never seen anything like this before.”

Biologists checked out the images of the six-inch fish and determined it was either a spadenose or sharpnose shark, according to the outlet.

Two-head mutations have become more common, but no one knows exactly why, National Geographic wrote in 2016. The outlet offered a few possible factors for the malformations, including pollution and a “dwindling gene pool due to overfishing.”

Still, the latest discovery is unusual.

Scientists and marine biologists said the two-headed shark Patil caught could be a first along the approximately 450-mile Maharashtra state coastline.

“Our records show that double-headed sharks are very rarely reported along the Indian coast,” a scientist from the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute told the Hindustan Times.

Anomalies can show up in freshwater fish as well. A lake trout with two mouths was caught in 2019.