Octopus are very common at night along the Monterey Peninsula. Prickly sharks are rare deep water sharks that are found in the Monterey Bay. Due to its small continental shelf and submarine canyon, unusual deep water creatures may sometimes be seen close to shore. Prickly sharks are an example of these unusual animals. Prickly sharks may be seen in about 100 feet of water off Moss Landing.
Basking sharks feed on plankton, and use their gill rakers to collect plankton in the water column.
Basking sharks are regular visitors of the Monterey Bay, and were the subject of a fishery in the Bay earlier in the century. Now, we can admire large groups of these spectacular sharks off Santa Cruz and Monterey. In California, there are about 80 species of rockfish that live in pretty much all the possible habitats. In shallow rocky reefs, one of the most common rockfish is the black and yellow rockfish. Instead of being black and yellow, gopher rockfish are black and pink, thus their Latin name, carnatus, which means flesh colored.