3/16/2023 0 Comments Whale watching montereyThey performed CSI-style necropsies on the bodies, which were intact, save for an impressively neat tear between the two pectoral fins. When the white shark carcasses washed ashore in 2017, Kock and colleagues suspected the orca duo was to blame. ( See more of orcas.) Photograph by Paul Nicklen, Nat Geo Image Collection They were named Port and Starboard, since their dorsal fins flopped over-one to the left and one to the right.Īn orca helps herd a school of herring in the deep waters of the Andfjorden in Norway. Tasty liversĪlison Kock, a marine biologist at the Cape Research Centre in Cape Town, South Africa, had already been studying two orcas that were attacking and eating livers of broadnose sevengill sharks, a species that lives in the kelp forests of False Bay. For instance, his recent study shows that the presence of orcas scares sharks away from elephant seal colonies in the Farallon Islands, which in turn benefits seals, the great white’s main prey.įollowing the 1997 attack, the entire great white population-about a hundred animals-left the islands prematurely and skipped their annual seal smorgasbord, Anderson says.īetween 20, the team tagged 165 white sharks with acoustic tags, and confirmed their hypothesis: The years that great whites crossed paths with orcas, they ate fewer seals. Overall, the incidents show that interactions between these two predators can have major impacts on the food chain, says Anderson. Though no one saw the South African killer whales-also known as orcas-kill the sharks, the parallels to the other attacks made orcas the likely culprits. In 2017, five white sharks were found beached on South Africa’s Western Cape. “It completely changed everybody's ideas.” ( Read why great whites are still a mystery to us.)Īs it turns out, it wasn’t a fluke. ET as part of National Geographic Channel’s SharkFest. “From that moment on, everything seemed to be different as far as perspective about orcas and white sharks,” Scot Anderson, a seasonal researcher for Monterey Bay Aquarium, says in the Whale That Ate Jaws: Eyewitness Report, which airs July 16 at 10 p.m. The incident sparked new lines of research, as well as some intriguing questions for Schulman-Janiger and many others: How could any ocean predator, even one called a killer whale, dominate the almighty great white? It was, at that time, the first documented sighting of killer whales eating white sharks. In October 1997, tourists in a whale-watching boat off the Farallon Islands, near San Francisco, witnessed two killer whales attack a great white shark and consume its liver. “I was thinking, Déjà vu, here we go again,” says the biologist, a research associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. When Alisa Schulman-Janiger heard great white shark carcasses had washed up on South African beaches without their livers a few years ago, she was shocked.
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