Unless you’re a large shark, say, over several meters long, you simply may not have sufficient power in your jaws to effectively tear off the meat, even if you could keep up with a blue whale. Sharks employ more of a sit and wait strategy to conserve energy, and pursue prey over short, fast bursts of speed of up to at least 11 metres per second.īut the difficulties for a shark in capturing a blue whale don’t end with their limited endurance at high speed. Their speed and endurance make them difficult prey to catch for sharks. With whale meat and blubber an important food for sharks, why might they not also hunt whales while they’re alive? It turns out whales can indeed become a large and highspeed target.īlue whales’ highly streamlined bodies, however, have evolved to travel as fast as 40 kilometres per hour, for as much as an hour or more. In fact, the fat in whale blubber can significantly increase a shark’s metabolism. Growing evidence suggests whale carcasses are an important part of the diets of large sharks. Large sharks are not only hunters, but also scavengers. So, have these carcasses resulted from shark predation? Or have these whales died from an otherwise unknown ailment, or human impacts such as fishing gear entanglement? Blue Whale Defence Vs. After all, what better meal than the massive source of high energy of the meat and thick, fatty blubber a whale brings!Indeed, media reports often capture images of sharks lurking around large whale carcasses.Ī white shark taking a bite out of a dead whale. If a shark could successfully capture a large whale, the winnings would be one of a grand banquet. They also have flexible and extensible jaws and sharp teeth designed to grab and rip flesh. Sharks, on the other hand, are highly specialised apex predators that hunt and capture large animals, such as large fish, seals and sea lions, and sometimes even dolphins.They are well designed for this, with streamlined bodies designed for ambush-and-chase style hunting. This is how blue whales maximise their energy intake while minimising effort. Instead of teeth, blue whales (along with humpbacks, and many other whale species) have bristle-like baleen, which strain the small organisms from the water when their mouth cavity is compressed. With this remarkable device, blue whales can engulf thousands of litres of water in one go. The lunge builds enormous water pressure against their mouth, inflating the pleat-like grooved blubber around their mouth cavity to balloon like an accordion’s bellows. They lunge through dense patches of thousands, if not millions, of krill, with large, gaping jaws that can open up to around 80 degrees. Rather, they evolved an efficient way of consuming very large amounts of tiny prey: krill. White sharks have teeth designed to rip flesh.Īt up to 30 metres long and weighing over 100 tonnes, a blue whale easily outsizes a white shark, which can measure perhaps over 6m and weigh less than a tonne.īut the blue whale didn’t get so big from killing and eating other large animals such as sharks.
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