Food time

Just saw this on Pharyngula -- it's a rather graphic but extremely cool video of white sharks scavenging from a Bryde's whale carcass. If you don't mind seeing a dead whale being disassembled, it's definitely worth watching. Basically, a research team towed the dead whale to near Seal Island, which is something like the great white equivalent of McDonald's, and watched what happened: something like thirty great white sharks showed up to eat in just a few hours. The sharks gorged themselves, and once satiated, well... there was no actual hot shark-on-shark action, but there is video proof that the males were quite willing.

As they mention in the video, nobody really understands how or when great whites get around to reproducing. This type of feeding frenzy is likely to be where the actual mating takes place, since great whites are not a very social species. A large, (relatively) calm, and co-ed group is an opportunity that these animals probably can't pass up.

Also interesting is something the video mentions rather off-handedly: the sharks didn't eat many fur seal pups for a few days after they finished the whale. It's not surprising that this would happen: sharks can go an extremely long time between large meals, and most predators won't bother actively hunting while they're still satiated from the last one. Instead, I found it interesting, as someone who's done a lot of shark education, that it would be mentioned at all. It was probably only meant as a coda to all the action, but I always like it when some attention is paid to the dynamic nature of a big predator's behavior.

It's natural enough for us to focus on the kill-and-eat activities of sharks, since that's one of the most charismatic things about them. Still, it's often portrayed as an activity that's completely disconnected from the shark's environment: the sharks are drawn to the cameras with bait and chum, and you see them devour some frozen, unidentifiable piece of tuna in slow motion. There's still plenty of that type of thing here (heck, that's the whole point of the video: watch the sharks eat this dead thing we found*), but if I were making a shark documentary, the whole point would be this: whether we're here filming it or not, these animals are real, and they're out here doing what they do all the time. They're not robots, or animated models, or fake in any way, and the role they play in their environment has a direct impact on a lot of other things. If a shark finds food today, some seal pup survives tomorrow. I find this sort of artificial spectacle rather pointless in most cases, though here it seems like a win situation all around -- after all, what else can you do with a dead whale? -- and the mention of the effect it had on the region gives what I see as important context.

(* Why on earth would the researcher go out on the whale? I don't buy the explanation of it giving a close-up view of how the sharks scavenge, especially since the very next scene showed one of the crew with a telephoto lens. It strikes me as extremely reckless showboating.)