CANBERRA – Hypnotizing drone footage shows a swarm of reef sharks tearing apart body remains humpback whale that died along the Australian coastline. About 60 heads big shark swirling in a mesmerizing spiral of eddies in a humpback eating frenzy.
Tourists John Cloke and Indy Crimmins filmed a video of a gruesome water party in the waters off Norman Beach near Albany in Western Australia. According to ABC News, they had just returned from a morning fishing trip, and Cloke saw a large object bobbing in the water with birds in the vicinity and sent his drone to investigate.
Drone footage shared on the couple’s Instagram page on May 16, 2022, shows dozens of sharks circling a dead humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). As the drone’s camera zoomed in, more sharks appeared around the mesmerizing maelstrom, waiting for a chance to enter and bite the humpback whale which measures about 15 meters long.
“At one point there were probably about 100 sharks around the (humpback whale) carcass. We can’t count them all,” Cloke told ABC News.
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Incidents of sharks and other scavengers eating dead whales at sea level are extremely rare events. Although experts say that the event itself is actually quite common.
“As someone who works in the field of shark research, this is very interesting footage but not too outlandish. The footage in the video is ‘beautiful’,” Steve Taylor, a shark researcher at Australia’s Department of Primary Industry and Regional Development, told ABC News.
In August 2021, a team of marine biologists unexpectedly discovered eight great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) viciously tearing apart a dead humpback whale off the coast of Massachusetts. In 2017, a sequence from the BBC’s Blue Planet II series also showed a number of different sharks scavenging the remains of a whale killed by a ship.
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Most cetaceans float to the surface after death because their bodies fill with gas as they decompose. A 2020 study, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, found that the amount of gas produced played a large role in determining whether whale or dolphin carcasses washed ashore.
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Larger, fat-rich cetacean species, such as the humpback whale, float for longer periods of time, sometimes more than a week. These conditions make it an ideal target for carrion predators such as sharks and seabirds.
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