Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)

[GuateGojira]

(08-19-2020, 03:18 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Though it was a juvenile, it was much bigger than Helen the shark, about 3 times (and measuring 32–33 ft or 9.7536–10.0584 m), so that was incredible! Humpback whales (Megaptera novæangliæ) have been seen to fight or dominate orcas or killer whales (Orcinus orca), which in turn dominate GW sharks, so if a GW shark can do that to a much bigger creature, then what could Megalodon have done to Livyatan melvillei? https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-megalod...#pid124473

I was reading the entire topic, plus the one of the “Baleen whales”, and I saw the conclusions of @”Bornean tiger” and are frankly biased toward the sharks with no logic sense. @”Shadow” made a good job trying to show how weird and even rubbish are these claims but when I read THIS post above, from Bornean Tiger, it became a red alert for me, as this level of comments are found only in the “fans boys” discussions in Youtube or forums like Carnivora. So, I will take a time to correct these ideas and to show how illogic they are.

 

1. White shark interaction with orcas:

It is well know that orcas dominate over sharks of any species, but it seems that there is a group of “fan boys” of sharks that still try to prove, sometimes at the level of stupidity, that the great and magnificent white shark is actually a match for the overgrow black dolphin. However the real fact is that the white shark is not a match for the orca in a one-to-one fight, leave out a group of orcas.

 

If we focus on size, the biggest white sharks may reach 6 meters long, some records suggest up to 6.4 meters and hypothetically up to 7 meters, the heaviest white shark reported did not surpassed the 3.5 tons and most of them do not surpass the 2 tons. On the orca side, the biggest orcas actually measured surpass the 9 meters and weight between 6 to 8 tons, there is no way that a white shark can compete with these. Interestingly the female orcas are the one that more often hunt sharks and from the small to medium populations that measure about the same length of the largest white sharks (6-7 meters) but even then already weight more (more than 4 tons).

 

Now, if we focus in intelligence, certainly the comparison is even more futile. There are studies of socialization on sharks, but you must take in count that this “socialization” is just basal and compared to snakes and are by no means at the same level of the mammals, even crocodiles are more social than white shark (at least they take care of they young and recognize the paper of the dominat male in the area). What they observed in white sharks is just opportunistic behavior that can be seen in crocodiles when several of them may join to kill an animal and eat it, but that do not means that this is cooperation at all. Now this can’t be compare with the socialization of the orcas, which are among the most intelligent animals on Earth, with one of the more complex social lives, they even have they own culture and language depending or the region, is like to try to compare the social life of an anaconda against the one of the elephant!

 

From any side that you see it, there is no comparison, and there are several documents that show that orcas clearly dominate over white sharks and even hunt them selectively.

 

Check this video, is in Spanish, but you can see the four sharks that were killed in that moment, two of them of over 5 meters long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV49x5M2TKg

 

2. White shark predation on humpback whale:

This is a very interesting case, but using only the superficial information do not show the true case. In the same articles that Bornean Tiger presented (this one in particular: https://www.newsweek.com/great-white-sha...le-1492244), it clearly say that the whale was of 7 meters long (not 9 or 10 meters), that is hardly even a young adult! Also check the description of the poor whale: “On inspection, they found a 23ft cetacean in poor health. Not only had it been caught in rope, but it was scrawny, covered in barnacles and crawling with whale lice.”

 

This was a small and in very bad shape whale calf and the other sharks clearly took advantage of this. The biggest of the sharks measured about 4 meters, clearly a full adult.

 

Also one of the experts said this: "We acknowledge that this was a singular event, a consequence of the whale being entangled and in poor condition," the researchers write. "Therefore, the event should not reflect all white shark attacks on live baleen whales. Nevertheless, this paper presents observations on a rarely observed interaction between white sharks and live whales."

 

So one single event about an opportunistic behavior is not evidence that white sharks predate on live whales at all, this is something exclusive of the orcas.

 

3. Humpback whales and orcas:

This is should not be surprising by anyone that had studied predators and prey relationship. Normally most of the whales do not have any defence against the attack of orcas, apart from speed. At this moment only humpback whales and the male of sperm whale are the only ones that had succeeded in stop the attack of orcas, but is this evidence of domination? The obvious answer is NO, after all the humpback whales are prey of orcas and they did hunt on the adults, but like any predator they will target mostly the calves. This is also shown in the large land predators like lions or wolves (I make this comparison as orcas hunt in packs, like these other two apex predators). @”Shadow” presented the perfect example so I don’t understand how is that @”Bornean Tiger” can’t see the logic on this. Lions and wolves hunt over African buffaloes and Bison respectively, they normally target the young specimens and when they can, they will target the adults ones, the same happen with orcas. Also, I mention the bovids as they are the only animals that normally fight back and may even injure its predators, so the humpback whales seems to be the equivalent, but at the end of the day the big whale is the prey and the large dolphin is the predator and nobody will say that the buffaloes “dominate” on the lions of the bison “dominate” on the wolves. It is so clear and logic.

 

4. Competition and domination:

It is quite clear that there is confusion in the terms “competition” and “domination” in these two topics. Predators that search the same prey base are competitors, like tiger-leopard-dhole or lion-hyena-leopard or wolf-puma-coyote, to give a few examples. However domination is when these competitors in the same ecological niche have the ability to control the habitat and suppress its competitors based in side and/or numbers, like the tiger with the leopard-dhole, or the lion with the hyena-leopard, or the wolf with the puma-coyote. Under this case, orcas and white sharks are competitors as they exploit the same ecological niche in some areas, but when these two coexist, the orca suppress and even predate on the white shark, so the mammal dominate the shark.

 

Now, this applies to orcas and humpback whales? Obviously not, there is no domination at all, here there is a relation between predator and prey, the predator attack and the prey defend itself. They do not share the same ecological niche and do not prey on the same animals. Only in the case of the resident orcas in the northwest of USA and Canada we can see coexistence with the humpback whale as both eat fish and these orcas do not predate on the whales and even then they are just competitors and no study had reported domination.

 

Finally, the clarification: white sharks do NOT dominate on humpback whales as coyotes do not dominate on bison, and humpback whales do NOT dominate on orcas as buffalo/bison do not dominate on lion/wolf. In this case, the idea that Carcharocles (O.) megalodon dominated over Livyatan melvillei based in this nonsense is rubbish and can be discarded with no effort.

 

In fact, it is fair to explain, again, which was the world of the “megalodon”. The idea that the "megalodon" was a giant white shark that hunted huge sperm whales (that do not even existed in those days, by the way) and that fought with pack of large orcas is a MYTH created long time ago and dragged by "fans" in the web. The true is that must of the whales in that time were very small, at about 6 meters in length, that most of the C. (o.) megalodon were about 10 meters in length (from tip of snout to tip of the tail fin) and where NOT giant versions of white sharks, also were not very fast swimmers. And finally the orcas that lived in those days were small, of about the same of the modern false killer whale and with similar diets. The Livyatan melvillei was a true competitor of the giant shark, but competitor do not mean that they run against each other at every moment, which is also a childlike idea of the "fans" at the web.

 

I hope this will clarify some points, I don’t mean to be rude, but certainly when a poster start showing ideas with no fundament and that clearly shows a biased position about a case or species, is our duty to provide the information to correct those situations.

 

Greetings to all. Reply