First Ever Photo of a Shark Eating Another Shark

WOW first ever picture of shark eating shark!!! Io9

If you're a shark, what could you possibly have to fear? You're the ultimate predator, the top of the marine food chain. You can swim around without a care in the world... unless another, even bigger shark is feeling hungry.

That's exactly what happened in this photo snapped by researchers from the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. It's the first known photo of a shark eating another shark, although at first glance it may look less like a shark-on-shark attack and more like the seabed coming alive and swallowing a shark whole.

That's because the predator in this situation is what's known as a tasselled wobbegong shark, which is a type of carpet shark. Just like their name implies, carpet sharks are generally flattened sharks with carpet-like patterns on their bodies that spend most of their time lying around on the bottom of the ocean. They generally dine on small fish or invertebrates, but the wobbegong shark can dislocate its jaw in order to chow down on something much bigger — in this case, a brown-banded bamboo shark.

Writing in the journal Coral Reef, the researchers describe their encounter with this shark-eat-shark moment