Diet: Great white sharks prefer fatty animals like seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters, but eat other marine animals such as fish and sea turtles. It has become one of the foremost killers in the sea. They come and they hunt great whites.
Apparently not, because in 2000 another orca in almost the same area of the 1997 attack was observed consuming a large piece of white flesh which was not believed to be from a mammal. But on Nov. 2 that year, when orcas from two different pods arrived at SEFI, not staying for too long, all 17 sharks disappeared within the next eight hours.
Was it just a coincidence?
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And when they do, the sharks withdraw from the area.“When confronted by orcas, white sharks will immediately vacate their preferred hunting ground and will not return for up to a year, even though the orcas are only passing through,” Jorgensen, lead author of the study published in.The elephant seals seem to benefit from the arrival of the orcas.
Great whites are now known to be warm blooded but orcas still have much higher metabolic rates because they breathe air. "Two orcas take a pectoral fin in their mouth and pull open a shark together to extract the liver.”.Ms Towner, who is based at the shark hotspot of Gansbaai, two hours east of Cape Town, said killer whales had only ever been spotted attacking great whites twice, and never before around South Africa.She said the whales may have started targeting great whites because their other food sources were disappearing as a result of pollution or climate change.There are only two predators alive that are bigger than killer whales – the sperm whale and the giant squid.These two giants are locked in an equally titanic struggle as sperm whales eat giant squid, often suffering horrendous scars from the squid’s tentacles as it lashes out in self-defence.Verdict: Despite the fact Great White Sharks have more terrifying teeth, the fact that Killer Whales are bigger, faster, and hunt in groups mean there is only one winner when these two top predators clash.When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Jorgensen and his colleagues observed this same fleeing behavior among white sharks on three more occasions in the following years.In fact, when the researchers combined information on 165 great white sharks they’d tagged between 2006 and 2013 with data collected on lion seals and orcas as part of a long-term wildlife monitoring program at Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, they found that the sharks’ fleeing behavior had a consistent pattern.Great white sharks gather around SEFI each fall between September and December to hunt for young elephant seals.
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