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What Sharks Are Afraid of: The Animals That Hunt and Eat Sharks
The circle of life really is a circle, even sharks can't avoid being eaten.
Sharks are often portrayed as fierce apex predators, elegant eating machines who rule the seas, and the stars of blockbuster monster movies. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (now streaming on Peacock) has chilled the spines of millions and made generations of kids and adults think twice about going into the water.
While we think of sharks as the most fearsome creatures in the sea, some sharks spend their lives at the lower end of the food chain. Many smaller sharks, and even some large ones, find themselves on the menus of other sharks, cephalopods, reptiles, marine mammals, and even a species of monkey. These are the things even sharks are afraid of.
For More on Sharks:
The 6 Coolest Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Sharks
The 10 Weirdest (Coolest) Sharks of All Time
How Baby Hammerheads Grow Their Weird Tool-Shaped Heads
What Animals Hunt and Eat Sharks?
Orcas Gruesomely Disembowel Great White Sharks
If you’re looking for the true rulers of the seas, look no further than Orcinus orca, the killer whale. Not only will they eat sharks, they seem to preferentially eviscerate them to seek out tasty organs. Orcas are known to team up to hunt down white sharks (recently, researchers even observed an orca taking on a great white shark one-on-one) and rip the livers from their bodies.
A great white’s liver makes up more than a quarter of its body mass and is nutrient rich. Orcas pull them from their fallen fishy foes, eat them, and leave the rest of the body to be taken by scavengers or wash up on shore.
Sharks Get Eaten by Other Sharks
Smaller sharks, including smaller species and juveniles from larger species, are threatened by bigger fish, and that includes other sharks. Some of the largest shark species specialize on other types of food and rarely if ever eat other sharks. The two largest species, the basking and whale sharks, feed exclusively on nearly microscopic organisms by filtering thousands of gallons of water per hour through specialized gills.
Other sharks, like tiger sharks, will eat absolutely anything they can get their mouths around, including other sharks (and even garbage). Shark-on-shark aggression begins for some sharks even before they are born. Some sharks give live birth, and their embryos go through an evolutionary gauntlet during development. By the end, only one or two sharks emerge, having eaten their potential siblings to survive.
Crocodilians vs. Sharks
Alligators and sharks don’t usually hang out in the same places. Sharks prefer coastal ocean waters while American alligators usually hang out in marshes, swamps, and wetlands. Run-ins between sharks and alligators aren’t exactly common, but they do occasionally cross paths and, when they do, the alligators usually win.
Researchers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have recorded these interactions in photos and by examining the stomach contents of alligators living at the Space Center’s Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. In Australia and other parts of the world, sharks bump up against the alligator’s more slender cousin, the crocodile, and they meet a similar fate.
Sharks Sometimes Grapple with Deep Sea Krakens
Sailors have been telling stories of cephalopods taking down large sharks and whales for centuries, and it turns out those stories may have been based in fact. Octopuses in aquariums have been observed hunting sharks in captivity and similar behavior has been recorded in the wild.
Back in 2019, photographer Deron Verbeck captured images of an oceanic whitetip shark with unusual markings. When he got the photos home, it became clear that they were scars leftover from a battle with a rather large tentacled beast, potentially a giant squid. Scientists suspect the shark dove deep looking for a meal and almost ended up a meal itself.
Chacma Baboons Sometimes Slurp Shark Eggs
Chacma baboons are Old World monkeys sometimes called the Cape baboon, in reference to their home in southern Africa. They grow to roughly 4-feet long, and that doesn’t count an approximately 2-foot tail.
They are omnivores and scavengers who will eat everything from fruit and seeds to bugs, birds, reptiles, and the occasional shark egg. In the spring, the baboons hit the beach every couple of weeks looking for a seafood spread. They snack on fish and crabs and then, during low tide, they seek out shark nesting grounds in the crooks of rocks, then slurp the babies right from their egg cases. It’s almost enough to make you see Jaws in a new light. Almost.
Watch Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3, and Jaws: The Revenge, all streaming now on Peacock!
