Florida is home to incredible wildlife. The elusive sovereign citizen and the state trooper-styled copmeleon; animals that can fly or swim or even tell the future. Perhaps the rarest of them all, though, is a creature only just recently captured on tape: The roadgoing bull shark.
Local ABC affiliate WPLG received a video from Hollywood (no, not that one, the one in Florida) Wednesday. In it, the roadgoing bull shark (carcharhinus pickuptruckus) can clearly be seen riding up I-95 — the largest roadway the species has ever been recorded traveling along.
Early researchers noted the roadgoing bull shark to be an amphibious creature, existing primarily in brackish aquatic environments. Like the inverse of a dolphin, while the roadgoing bull shark can exist in dry air, it can’t do so for prolonged periods — it needs water in order to breathe.
The roadgoing bull shark travels on land as part of its mating process, taking advantage of human-built roads to facilitate access to other waters in order to find potential mates. By doing this, the roadgoing bull shark maintains a diverse gene pool. This behavior, which has been recorded since before European colonizers arrived in North America, appears influenced by humans — a rare example of our behaviors markedly affecting the evolution of other animals.
While the roadgoing bull shark regularly travels human roads during its mating season, it’s traditionally a reclusive creature. Between its preference for traveling at night, as protection from the harsh sun, and its preferred habitat within the largely-unsettled Everglades, few images of the shark exist today. Early explorers made sketches and wrote descriptions, and later researchers took grainy, blurry photographs, but this WPLG video is the first time the shark has been captured in motion — a watershed moment for the species.