A college student on a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico caught dramatic footage of a big tiger shark repeatedly attacking a hammerhead on a fishing line.
Shot on July 17, the video shows a hammerhead shark struggling on the line. Then, a tiger shark cruises in and bites the hammerhead.
The attack went on for several minutes, until the tiger shark “grabbed the hammerhead around its head, broke the line, and then dragged him straight down,” says Ryan Willsea, who made the video with his brother Aaron, and whose line caught the hammerhead.
“It was an incredible thing to see and catch on film,” he says.
Willsea spent three days fishing in the Gulf during a vacation to the area, using baitfish and hoping to catch tuna. He and his fellow anglers tried their luck about 30 to 40 miles (about 50 to 60 kilometers) off of Venice, Louisiana.
“When we got the hit, we first thought it was a another big tuna,” says Willsea, who had caught two other tuna earlier that day. “But then we saw it was a hammerhead.”
The crew “played” the big fish for five to ten minutes before the tiger shark appeared, first as a dark shadow in the water, Willsea says. (See where The Shallows got sharks wrong.)
Sharks Being Sharks
That big fish was undoubtedly a tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier), says George Burgess, who leads the shark research program at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Tiger sharks, which live in warm waters around the world, are “expert at taking advantage of situations when a potential prey item is compromised,” says Burgess. “And nothing makes an animal more compromised than having a hook in its mouth and being pulled to a boat.”
Tiger sharks routinely go for other sharks, especially when they are wounded. In fact, the reputation of sharks as “the garbage eaters of the sea, which will go after everything,” is largely based on the species, Burgess says. Large and powerful, the tiger shark is one of a handful of species that most commonly bites people.
Read more – http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/tiger-shark-attacks-hammerhead-video/