(These chunks are conical, so the cookie-cutter metaphor isn’t quite right “Ice cream scoop shark” or “watermelon baller shark” are more accurate, if less catchy.) Shark want cookie These are serious injuries-the biggest craters ever recorded were 5 centimetres wide and 7 centimetres deep. With twisting motions, it scoops out a chunk of flesh, leaving behind circular craters exactly like those that del Villar saw on the great white. When the cookie-cutter finds a victim, it latches on with its large fleshy lips and bites down with its saw blade. “I dont know of any other animal that leaves a bite like that.”

Instead, Papastamatiou thinks that they were the bite-marks of another shark, just a sixth of the size-a cookie-cutter. “A wound from a hook should leave more of a hole and would not be as smooth,” he says. Del Villar took photos of the animal and sent them to a team of scientists, including Yannis Papastamatiou from the Florida Museum of Natural History. Both were just behind the corner of the young male’s fearsome mouth. The other was a round crater, still open and bloody. On 25 August 2010, one of these divers, Gerardo del Villar, saw a great white shark off Guadalupe Island with two odd wounds on its head. Operators chum the waters to lure in the sharks, while divers enter in floating steel cages. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įvery year, between August and December, great white sharks arrive at the western coast of Mexico, and people jump into the ocean to see them. However, researchers found one cookiecutter shark in the stomach of a large bluefin tuna, suggesting the tactic isn't foolproof.Please be respectful of copyright. One specimen was caught at a depth of 9,840 feet (3,000 meters), Papastamatiou said.īut how wise is it to attack large predator 10 times your size? There's almost no evidence of how often the cookiecutter's bold strategy fails, Papastamatiou said. They often dive during the day and come near the surface at night. Cookiecutter sharks range throughout the world in tropical and subtropical waters. The cookiecutter shark (Isistius brasiliensis) can grow up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) long, while great whites can reach lengths of nearly 20 feet (6 meters), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Scientists don't think bites from the cookiecutters can seriously harm these large predators. '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. 'Animals at the top of the food chain can still get attacked by things a lot smaller than them,' Papastamatiou told OurAmazingPlanet. 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.

Cookie cutter sharks