By Brandon
Specktor, Senior Writer | October 2, 2018 12:32pm ET
When a
beached whale arrives on your local shore, it's sad, but not too surprising.
When a live, thrashing tiger shark arrives right next to it, it's a good time
to dust off your favorite expletives.
That's what
some Ponta, Mozambique residents did when they saw a massive, 13-foot-long (4
meters) tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier)
seemingly beach itself in order to chow down on the 30-ton humpback
whale carcass bedecking the local shore.
According to
Lorrayne Gaymer, a Mozambique dive instructor who filmed the incident (and the
community's shocked response), the 66,000-lb. (30,000 kilograms) whale washed
up on Ponta beach in early September. [13
Bizarre Things That Washed Up On Beaches]
"Initially,
a rescue attempt was made for the whale, but after the locals of Ponta
contacted a whale expert it became clear that the whale was very sick and
shouldn't be moved," Gaymer told The
Daily Mail. "It had passed away, and as the tide went out, hundreds of
locals of Ponta all came down to take their share."
Then, Gaymer
said, the sharks descended. According to Caters
New Agency, an estimated 60 sharks of different species — including tiger, bulland
dusky sharks — took turns ripping hunks of meat and blubber out of the whale's
side. By the time Gaymer arrived on the scene and started filming, one giant
tiger shark had swum so close to shore that it temporarily beached itself on
the sand near the whale.
As you can
intuit from the sundry shrieks and bleeped-out expletives that begin Gaymer's
video, the sight of a tiger shark so close to shore was both exciting and
terrifying for many spectators.
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