Rare footage has been captured of a large group of sharks, peacefully feasting on a decaying carcass off the coast of Hawaii.
The oceanic whitetip and tiger sharks happily shared the blubbery remains, displaying no aggressive behaviour towards each other or any of the camera crew filming them.
Marine biologists at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa studied this event and recently published their findings in the scientific journal Frontiers in Fish Science.
First author Dr Molly Scott said: “To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a feeding aggregation of tiger sharks and oceanic whitetip sharks scavenging concurrently, and peacefully, on a carcass.
“These species are rarely seen together in the wild because of the vastly different habitats they occupy.”
Oceanic whitetips are a threatened species of shark that grow to around two metres long, and spend their lives roaming the oceans, swimming from place to place – but occasionally visiting Hawaii’s Big Island in spring and summer.
In comparison, tiger sharks are bigger, growing up to four metres long, and are more coastal. They prefer chilling in the same area all year round.
So, said Scott, it is “incredibly rare” to see these two species in the same place, let alone casually sharing some grub together without any fighting.
“Even though up to 12 individual sharks were feeding intermittently from a very small, highly degraded carcass, we did not observe any agonistic inter- or intra-species aggression,” she said.
“This was surprising to me; I would assume some agonistic behaviours would exist when there are that many sharks attempting to feed around such a small carcass. But it seems all individuals knew their place in the social hierarchy.”
That social hierarchy seemed to give larger sharks first dibs on food, with the tiger sharks dominating – except for a smaller female – followed by the two largest oceanic whitetips.
“Some individuals, like the female tiger shark, may have been shyer or less bold, likely again due to her size,” said Scott. “Also, with the other sharks having established the feeding hierarchy before the female tiger shark arrived, maybe she didn’t feel too welcome to get in on the action.”
The smallest sharks stayed under the surface of the water and fed on meat scraps drifting away.
All these sharks are primarily hunters, but they may turn to scavenging when the opportunity arises, such as when they sniff a carcass.
The floating food was initially spotted by a tourist boat in April 2024, around 10km off the west coast of Big Island.
The sighting that followed lasted eight and a half hours, involving at least nine oceanic whitetip sharks and five tiger sharks. Two or three people were in the water that whole time.
“None of the photographers reported any scary, aggressive, or harmful interactions with the sharks,” said Scott. “I hope this provides a new perspective that sharks are not the human-eating predators they are made out to be.”
The researchers are also hoping that this rare sighting will help scientists better understand the behaviour of sharks – in particular, how they interact with each other.
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