A large mako shark (considered the fastest shark with speeds of up to 50 km/h) was tracked by a team of researchers before mysteriously disappearing. It was apparently killed by an even larger predator.
A female porbeagle shark mysteriously disappears
The behaviors and travels of large marine mammals and other endangered species are closely scrutinized. A team of scientists from Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island have been following the life of porbeagle sharks, also called mako sharks for several years. One of the fastest sharks in the world, they live in the open sea, in tropical and temperate waters.
While monitoring one of them – an 8-foot-long pregnant female that was traveling from New England to the warmer waters of Bermuda to give birth – scientists found that one of its tags surprisingly spiked in temperature, from 59 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit in an instant. The team uses two tags, one on the shark's fin that gives scientists “a very precise geolocation when the fin is out of the water,” and a second that records the shark's temperature and depth in the ocean.
Great White Shark? Or another even bigger predator?
“That's how we knew the shark had actually been eaten or attacked,”said James Sulikowski, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University. He said the sudden increase was caused by an attack on the predator, possibly by a larger one.
“We knew something had happened. We knew the tag was inside a warm-blooded creature…and we knew it wasn't a whale or a mammal, because mammals are much warmer than that.” The researchers quickly narrowed their guess to a Great White Sharkor another larger Mako Shark, since their body temperature is usually between 25 and 27 degrees. Already imposing and very fast, only individuals of their species or therefore predators at the top of the food chain like great white sharks are capable of such an act.
Enough to legitimately ask this question: why do sharks eat each other? This behavior, called Intraspecific cannibalism is when sharks attack weaker or younger members of their species. But according to science, tiger sharks and great white sharks are also known to attack other shark species, a behavior called interspecific cannibalism. These behaviors are often motivated by survival reasons, such as competition for food or feeding opportunism, it reads.
This kind of rare occurrence prompted James Sulikowski to further study the behaviors of these large marine predators, and is a testament to the lack of knowledge on the subject. “This makes us want to study further and learn more about the vulnerability of other large sharks to being eaten and who the largest sharks are.”