Great white sharks might just be the most badass animals on Earth (possible exception: honey badgers). They pretty much eat anything they can fit their mouth and razor-sharp teeth around -- no fear, just pure hunting, breeding, and killing instinct.
And now they have outdone themselves.
New and ongoing studies of the sharks in the Pacific Ocean have turned up two new, amazing traits -- great whites migrate thousands of kilometers from coastal waters to parts of the Pacific Ocean so barren scientists call them "ecological deserts."
Why would an apex predator flee shallow waters full of tasty morsels for a wasteland of open ocean? Hard to say, but even more mysterious is what they do once they get there: they dive. Deep.
Great white sharks aren't known for plumbing the frigid, inky depths of the ocean -- that's territory normally left up to weird alien life forms whose bodies fluoresce in the darkness, and who aren't used to eating ravenously.
But what if the deep-diving sharks have found a smorgasbord down there? What if their dives are in fact big game safaris to the ocean's dark interior? What if they're hunting giant squid?
It sounds far-fetched -- an epic, aquatic "Clash of the Titans" that must surely be the stuff of fantasy. But Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute thinks that's what they're up to. He tagged and tracked 22 great whites out to a spot about 1,500 miles east of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. In the area were sperm whales -- famed for their giant squid-hunting habit -- and lots of squid.
A separate study off the coast of New Zealand found similar behavior -- great whites there dive a record 4,000 feet down.
While the shark-squid connection hasn't been firmed up in either case, it's hard to reason why sharks would expend so much energy swimming out to sea and making elaborate dives if they weren't getting something in return. Something like food.
Image: hermanusbackpackers on Flickr
Tags: Animal Behavior, Animal Research, Animal Science, Sharks
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