In March 2024, a group of boaters in Venice Beach, Florida ran into a great white shark feeding on a whale carcass. While white sharks’ diet consists primarily of large marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, scavenging off of whale carcasses is an important way for them to maintain their diet.
From the southern tip of South Africa to the California coast, we’ve observed white sharks, also known as great white sharks, engaging in fascinating hunting patterns from shorelines around the world. These apex predators are capable of almost anything — even taking down the ocean’s largest creatures.
And though there’s less documented evidence of white sharks hunting larger prey, a few experts have witnessed them preying on living whales. A team of biologists spotted about eight white sharks attacking an injured humpback whale in Mossel Bay, South Africa in 2017. An earlier study, published 2012 in Marine Mammal Science, documented four other instances of white sharks preying on whales.
Experts are attempting to explain this rare, fascinating behavior.
