Thresher Sharks Hunt with Huge Weaponised Tails
by Ed Yong
For most sharks, the front end is the dangerous bit. Thresher sharks are the exception. They’re deadly at both ends, because they’ve managed to weaponise their tails.
The top halves of their scythe-like tail fins are so huge that they can be as long as the rest of the shark. For around a century, people have been saying that the threshers lash out at their prey with these distended fins—hence the name. But no one had ever seen them do so in the wild.
In 2010, one team showed that they can lash out at tethered bait under controlled conditions. But Simon Oliver has done better. His team spent the summer of 2010 in the Philippines, watching and filming wild pelagic thresher sharks—the smallest of the three species—hunting large shoals of sardines. The videos are spectacular and unambiguous: threshers really do hunt with their tails.
“It was absolutely extraordinary,” says Oliver, who is founder of the Thresher Shark Research and Conservation Project and based at the University of Liverpool. “We always expected this but there’s never been any solid documented evidence. This is the first time the behaviour has been observed in the sharks’ natural environment, and we observed a lot of it.”
When I first read about thresher sharks as a kid, I imaged that they would swim towards its prey, bank sharply, and lash out sideways with their tails. Oliver’s team showed that the sharks do use sideways slaps, but rarely.
more
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/10/thresher-sharks-hunt-with-huge-weaponised-tails/
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