06/09/2026
Yes, it’s real. No, that’s not what it looks like.
Most pictures going around are AI. This is the actual shark.
It’s a nurse shark, about 6.5 feet long, hooked on a sport fishing trip off Parismina on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, just south of Tortuguero National Park. Caught 120 feet down, photographed, and released alive. Scientists from Costa Rica, Brazil and Venezuela wrote it up in the journal Marine Biodiversity in 2025. First one ever recorded.
So how does a shark turn orange?
Two rare conditions, on the same animal.
1. Albinism. Its body makes no melanin (the dark pigment). That’s why there’s no brown, no grey, and the eyes are white with no iris.
2. Xanthism. The yellow-orange pigment is turned all the way up.
A normal nurse shark is brown-grey because melanin sits over the yellow-orange layer and hides it. Take the melanin away and crank the orange up, and you get a shark the colour of a traffic cone.
What caused it? Nobody knows yet. Most likely genetic. Inbreeding, warmer water and a hormone imbalance have all been floated, but the researchers said it plainly: more study needed.
The part that gets me is that it survived at all. Nurse sharks hunt on the bottom at night and rely on blending in. A bright orange 6-footer can’t hide anywhere. Yet this one made it to full adult size, healthy. One theory is that it lives in the murky water near the river mouths, where nothing sees it coming.
And it came from the side of Costa Rica most people never see. Parismina and Tortuguero have no road in. You arrive by boat or small plane. Rainforest to the water, turtles nesting on the beach, serious fishing. Far fewer people move there. The Pacific side gets all the attention.
Photos: Garvin Watson / Parismina Domus Dei.
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