The photo says it all: an alien-looking shark, adorned with mossy hairs and a flat face, with its mouth agape and a slender bamboo shark headfirst inside. Though not unusual for a shark to snack on another shark, it's not typical behavior — and it's certainly not common for humans to catch the action firsthand.
n fact, the researchers who came upon the shark-eat-shark scene on the fringes of Great Keppel Island on the southern Great Barrier Reef didn't realize at first what they were looking at.
"The white bamboo shark appeared first, and as we came closer, we suddenly realized that its head was not hidden under a ledge, as is usual, but in the mouth of the very well-camouflaged wobbegong," Daniela Ceccarelli of Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence (ARC) for Coral Reef Studies, told LiveScience, adding that "witnessing predation events like this is very rare."
Ceccarelli and David Williams, also of ARC, were conducting a fish census there on Aug. 1, 2011, when they spotted the sharks.
The predator was a four-foot wobbegong, a bottom-dewlling shark that uses its natural camouflage to blend into the seafoor and ambush prey.
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