Scattering fears for great white sharks

Just seeing the killer whale, sharks off San Francisco, USA, will disappear from the sea all year long.

Great white sharks , animals at the top of the food chain, often fled when killer whales swam into their territory, according to a new study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium published March 16 in the journal Nature. When studying sharks in the Greater Farallones National Marine Reserve off Mexico, scientists found sharks disappeared throughout the season after killer whales appeared in the area.

"These are huge white sharks. Some are more than 5.5 meters long and they have total control of the area. On average, we recorded about 40 shark seal hunts of sharks. white in southeast Farallon island every season After the killer whale appeared, we did not see any sharks and there was no more hunt ", Scot Anderson, scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium, share.

Research by American scientists reveals that white sharks are afraid of killer whales.(Photo: YouTube).

The team tracks clashes between white sharks and killer whales. They looked at data from 165 white sharks tagged from 2006 to 2013 and survey results for 27 years on seals, white sharks and killer whales in the region.

White sharks gather in the Farallon Islands each year between September and December to hunt for young elephant seals. They usually spend a month in Southeast Farallon Island. This is a hunting ground for both white sharks and killer whales. Killer whales also hunt elephant seals but do not linger for long and only occasionally visit the island.

In some cases when encountering an enemy, sharks will swim away for a few minutes."When encountering killer whales, white sharks will immediately disappear from their favorite hunting grounds and will not reappear in a year, although killer whales only pass by" , Salvador Jorgensen, home science in Monterey Bay Aquarium, research leader, said.

Sharks will swim to other elephant seals or swim farther out to sea. According to the research team, the finding shows that the food chain is quite complex and the interaction between the top predators in the sea is quite complicated because of rare records.

Earlier, killer whales were found to kill and eat white shark liver. In False Bay, South Africa, a group of scientists found seven mangrove carcasses killed and extirpated. In 2017, researchers suspected that two killer whales would have killed five white sharks in offshore waters.

Anderson and Jorgensen are not clear whether the killer whale off San Francisco targets and kills white sharks. Instead, killer whales can chase sharks away from the area to monopolize food sources . Only one case of killer whales that hunts for white fish is confirmed in Southeast Farallon Island.

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