Sharks are usually considered top predators with sharp teeth and 16-foot-long torpedo bodies. They have little to fear, except for other sharks and killer whales.
Since they are mostly known as predators rather than prey, seeing a half-eaten body of a shark is extremely surprising. Two fishermen from Australia shared a video of their extraordinary find during a fishing trip off the coast of Queensland, about 155 miles (250 kilometers) from the Gold Coast.
Marine biologists record measurements from a porbeagle shark caught during the North Atlantic Monster Shark Tournament at State Pier 3 on July 15, 2017 in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
There's Always A Bigger Fish
Sammy Hitzke and Shaun Whale were fishing when they managed to hook what they initially believed to be a big fish and spent several hours trying to reel it in, according to the Metro. It was then, when they successfully pulled it up the ocean, that they found the big fish they were expecting was actually a half-eaten shark.
Naturally, they were shocked to only see the shark's vertebrae connecting the front half of its body. Sammy said in the video that it looked like it was "sharked" as almost three-quarters of its body was missing. Meanwhile, his mate Shaun, an experienced fisher, described his experience as the find of a lifetime.
"I'm absolutely exhausted, but this might be the craziest thing I've ever seen in the ocean," the news outlet quoted Shaun. He added that through all his experience in fishing, not once did he find a thresher shark eaten by a larger fish.
Their video, titled "There's always a BIGGER FISH! Deep water fishing gets crazy!," was uploaded on YouTube and has already been viewed over 243,000 times as of writing.
Some viewers believe that the shark was likely attacked by a giant squid, pointing out that the shark's injury does not look like it was done by another species of shark. On the other hand, there is still the possibility that a killer whale could have done that to the giant shark.
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The Predator That Scares Sharks
Although sharks have a reputation as great predators, the Atlantic reports that they too are prey to their predators. Salvador Jorgensen from the Monterey Bay Aquarium has been studying great white sharks in California for more than a decade.
In 2009, he and his team tagged 17 great whites to observe their behavior for nine months as they circled Southeast Farallon Island and preyed on elephant seals.
Based on the data from the tags, great white sharks immediately flee whenever orcas, also known as killer whales, arrive. Since orcas also hunt seals, the team only thought that sharks leave because they did not want the competition. But given the speed at which they left the scene, the researchers questioned their first hypothesis.
They propose that the most likely explanation for this behavior is that sharks are terrified of orcas, as the latter has a friendlier image than them. Toby Daly-Engel, a shark expert at the Florida Institute of Technology, said that orcas are a potentially more dangerous predator because they have a lot of social behaviors that allow them to communicate and hunt effectively, something that sharks lack.
With both brains and brawn, they can kill sharks in complex ways. Records of orcas encountering sharks show that it always ends very badly for the sharks. They usually go for a shark's liver, which is a quarter of its body weight and is rich in fats and oil. Both orcas and sharks are apex predators, but the latter is scared of the former.
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