Report of the crocodile shark Pseudocarcharias kamoharai (Matsubara, 1936) from deep waters of the Andaman Sea

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The crocodile shark Pseudocarcharias kamoharai (Matsubara 1936) is the only representative of the monotypic family Pseudocarchariidae and is the smallest known living mackerel shark (order: Lamniformes), which is an uncommon, pelagicoceanic shark having circum-tropical distribution, usually found at depths ranging from the surface to 590 m (Compagno and Musick 2005). Pseudocarchariid shark P. kamoharai was first reported and described from the Pacific Ocean by Matsubara (1936) and in New Zealand waters by Stewart (2001). Even though P. kamoharai is distributed worldwide in oceanic tropical waters, reports from the Indian Ocean are few and patchy, including from South African waters (D’Aubery 1964), Madagascar (Compagno 2001), Seychelles (Nevill 2007), Maldives (Adam et al. 1998), Malaysia (Ahmad and Lim 2012), Sri Lanka (Moron et al. 1998), Australia (Last and Stevens 1994; Ariz et al. 2006), and Indonesia (White 2007). From Indian waters, Kizhakudan and Rajapackiam (2013) reported P. kamoharai off Chennai, confirming its distribution in the Bay of Bengal. Akhilesh et al. (2013, 2014) have published the checklist of chondrichthyans from Indian waters. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species lists the status of P. kamoharai as BNear Threatened^ (Compagno and Musick 2005).