Sometimes, it’s a shark-eat-shark world. Documented cases of larger sharks dining on smaller ones are relatively rare. Scientists have now found the first evidence of a larger species consuming the porbeagle shark, according to a report in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Porbeagles live in the Atlantic Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. They grow to around 12 feet and weigh up to about 500 pounds. Scientists started tracking a group of porbeagles in 2020 — not to see if they would end up as a food source, but to follow their migration route.
Tracking Shark Transmissions
Brooke Anderson, then a graduate student at Arizona State University, and colleagues captured porbeagles off Cape Cod in Massachusetts in 2020 and 2022. They attached two types of tags to each shark. One, mounted on the fin, only transmitted when it rose above the water’s surface. Another measured water depth and temperature.
