How Sharks Hunt

Karen Yeh
2020年11月19日
讀畢需時 2 分鐘

已更新：2020年11月20日

Sharks, the top predator in the ocean food chain, strike a fear deeply down to people’s heart around the world. For their scary appearance, muscular bodies, and razor-like teeth, which make them seem like creatures straight out of nightmare. Hence, they constantly become the popular subject for Hollywood horror movies. However, sharks are in fact more intelligent than most of the movie’s depiction. They are the high-intelligence predators in the water and they usually use three strategies to hunt their preys, which are sensing, stalking, and catching.

The first strategy that sharks tend to use is sensing. And the sense of smell is probably the most important one because they rely on it to detect their preys’ location. A shark can easily sense the smell of a drop of blood even when it’s miles away. What’s more, with other senses’ mutual help, sharks can be called as the advanced sensing machine in the water. For example, with the help of ampullae of Lorenzini, it enables sharks to detect the electrical fields caused by movements of their preys. Hence, sharks can locate the accurate place of their next meal with ease.

Just like other carnivore predators, once the sharks spot the prey, they will wait for the right time to attack. Before that time comes, the action of stalking needs to begin first. Normally, sharks like to hunt in dawn or late evening because at those time periods they can blend in the water more. Additionally, at those time period, there’s less sunlight piercing in the water, which also means less chance of being spotted. Therefore, time plays a rather crucial part in shark’s hunting process.

Catching the prey is the last step before sharks can dig in their meal. However, there are many species of sharks, and not every shark follows the same pattern of catching. Take the gentlest one, whale shark, and the fiercest one, great white shark, for example. While whale sharks swim slowly across the water with their mouths open and food come in to it automatically, the great white strike the prey with its body in a high speed and then drag the prey down to the surface with its powerful jaw. Though using different methods, sharks still achieve their ultimate goal, catching their preys.

To sum up, sharks are the strategic hunters in the ocean because the ways they use to hunt are very effective. Though, I understand that knowing sharks’ hunting strategies won’t lessen our fear for them, I still think that it is worthy knowing. Since, the more you get to know something, the more you will be in awe as well as respect it. What’s more, it is important for us not to trust every thing that movies convey to us, sometimes it is better for us to investigate something more by ourselves.