A grisly discovery on the southwest coast of Australia has researchers theorizing how a great white shark was torn in two.
The shark, which did not go out of this world in the best of ways, was found near Portland, Victoria, a staggeringly pretty place about 250 miles west of Melbourne. It’s a relatively sharky spot, but even the most apex of apex predators can fall victim to a challenger. In this case, it’s likely that the great white was killed by a pod of orcas, one of the few creatures in the sea that will actively take on a great white. Interestingly, orcas often slice into the shark’s body and pluck out its liver, leaving the rest of the shark for the scavengers.
The great white in question here was about 10 feet long — when it was in one piece, that is — and just two days after it was found, a pod of orcas was spotted in a nearby bay.
Orcas are surprisingly fussy when it comes to what they eat, but great white livers are something of a delicacy to them. They also have been known to prey on makos, bronze whalers, and tiger sharks. According to reports, they’ll also slurp out the intestines of sunfish, a freakishly large animal.
“I’m not surprised to see this in a place like Portland,” Dr. Lauren Meyer, a Flinders University trophic ecologist, told ABC. “We know there are white sharks that go through that area and use it as an important corridor. We also know that it’s a place for killer whales where they hunt a number of different prey items.”
Despite our curiosity, we still have many questions about orcas. “They’re relatively elusive and each different pod and ecotype has such specific behavior that it’s hard to draw conclusions across all of killer whales because they all act so differently,” Meyers explained.
The carcass of the great white shark is in the process of being examined in hopes that it will tell researchers a little bit more about how orcas live.
