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Great white sharks fled to avoid being hunted by liver-eating killer whales
- Killer whales have been killing great white sharks off South African shores, devouring their livers
- Scientists suggest that the remaining great whites that survived moved to avoid being hunted
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For years, great white sharks were turning up dead on South Africa’s False Bay and Gansbaai shores missing something crucial – their livers.
Killer whales had been extracting the sharks’ livers with chilling precision, killing them in the process.
Then, the sharks stopped washing ashore. They stopped swimming near those shores – some of their most well-known South African habitats – altogether. They were just gone.
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“The decline of white sharks was so dramatic, so fast, so unheard of that lots of theories began to circulate,” Michelle Jewell, an ecologist at Michigan State University Museum, told Hakai Magazine.
People worried that overfishing of both the food the sharks eat and the sharks themselves may have killed off large swathes of the population.
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But, it turns out that the sharks didn’t die off, they were just hiding out in a new part of town, trying to avoid trouble, according to a new study in the journal Ecological Indicators’ October issue.
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