Seals are just full of surprise . Not only have these big - eyed , innocent looking pinnipeds been the premier suspects for a decade - longmurder mystery caseinvolving hundreds of harbor porpoises , but the annoying mammals have also been caughttrying to have sex with penguins . Now , adding to this lean of startling behaviors , scientists have caught the animals vote out and then partially bolt up mid - sized predatory sharks .
Although this is the first documentation of such an event , if it turns out to be commonplace , then the discovery could have implications in our understanding of the role that seals play in the marine food vane . The observance have been published in theAfrican Journal of Marine Science .
Back in 2004 , photographer and shark expert Chris Fallows noticed something rather bizarre whilst on a gravy boat stumble near Cape Point , South Africa : a unseasoned male seal chasing after a puritanic shark . When the chaser caught up with the shark , it hurl the dupe into the atmosphere and thendevoured its innards , or viscera , go forth the chassis . Despite the fact that fallow often spend as much as 200 day of the year at ocean studying sharks , he had never seen this before and did not find a repetition incident for almost a decade . Then , in December 2012 , he learn something even more extraordinary unravel .
During a baited diving for a lot of tourer in the same sphere , Fallows witnessed a male Cape fur seal discourteously gatecrash the blue shark gathering before go on to viciously assail them , bolt down and feeding on the bowel of five of the ten sharks present .
“ In more than 2,000 pleasure trip working with sharks over the last 21 years , ” Fallowssaid at the fourth dimension , “ this is the only meter I have ever seen a stamp kill several shark and I can find no disk of such an result happening elsewhere . ”
mantle pelt seals and blue shark ordinarily share a similar diet , feasting on smaller Pisces , crustaceans and calamari . Both are also known to dine on small shark coinage , and gentle sharks have been seenchasing after fur sealsbefore , although they never wangle to catch up . But never before had anyone see pelt seals preying on sharks this size , some of which were almost a meter and a half in duration ( 4.5 foundation ) .
Understandably , nautical life scientist are surprised that the animals would go for such a high-risk luncheon . “ You do n’t desire your meal to come prick you in the ass , and the shark has some potency to cause serious harm , ” maritime predator expert Dominic Tollit toldNew Scientist .
Something else which also piqued the scientists ’ interest was the watching that the sealskin only went for the shark ’ entrails . Although this is the richest part of the shark in terminus of vigour , as pointed out bySmithsonian , the fact that the seal did n’t bother to eat the quietus demonstrates that it could afford to be choosey and probably was n’t lacking in food reservoir . This could have crucial implications for the marine food mountain chain since , if seal are only eat the guts of larger prey , then they will ask to bolt down a mountain more than if they were exhaust the whole fauna . But right now it ’s difficult to determine whether seals could be affecting blue shark population given the fact that this feeding behaviour has only been observed twice .
[ ViaSmithsonianandNew Scientist ]
