IT’S a classic mystery of the deep. Why does the hammerhead shark have the bizarrely shaped head from which it gets its name?
There have been a variety of suggested explanations. Some simply say that the sharks use their heads to “hammer” and pin down their favourite food. More plausibly, others have speculated that the wide lobes of the hammerhead allow it to have longer electroreceptors, the organs that all sharks use to detect the electric fields produced by nearby prey. This might allow hammerheads to sense subtler electric fields from more distant prey than their narrow-headed cousins.
Now it…
