"This really shows there's no marine predator that can't be attacked by this little shark, which is impressive," he said. The sharks have been known to prey on a wide variety of marine animals, including swordfish, whales, orcas and even a human swimmer - and now, great white sharks. "'Ice-cream-scoop shark' would be technically more accurate, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it." The sharks' name comes from the uniformity of the bite, which looks "like you took a cookie cutter to some dough," Papastamatiou said. "Animals at the top of the food chain can still get attacked by things a lot smaller than them," Papastamatiou told OurAmazingPlanet.Ĭookiecutter sharks leave a very distinctive scar when they bite their specialized jaw allows them to "scoop out a hemispherical plug of flesh from their prey," according to the study. It's the first photographic evidence of such a bite, said study author Yannis Papastamatiou, a marine biologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Great whites are about 10 times the size of a cookiecutter shark.ĭivers in a shark tank off of Guadalupe Island, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) west of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, took a photograph of a great white sporting a fresh bite from a cookiecutter, as documented in a study published recently in the journal Pacific Science. But unlike typical meat eaters, these sharks don't kill their prey - they just take a bite and move on.Īnd for the first time, scientists have found evidence that these small sharks even go after one of the world's most fearsome predators, the great white shark. Like most sharks (or any marine animal, for that matter), cookiecutters roam the ocean looking for food. Cookiecutter sharks aren't very neighborly.
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