Unless you are planning a short swim in the Bahamas or off the coast of Australia soon, discover this terrifying documentary on sharks that devour each other.
Some wildlife documentaries sometimes look like horror movies. This is the case of Cannibal Sharks, a 44-minute report directed by Mark Woodard and available on Disney+.
Built like a real police investigation, and based on several very specific cases, the document starts from a simple and chilling observation: in recent years, researchers have observed several attacks between sharks in various places around the world.
A large shark caught in a net that attracts others by struggling, lemon sharks in a mangrove swamp in the Bahamas that devour without restraint the youngest specimens of their own species, or even a bull shark that swallows the one of his own in the middle of an aquarium in Seoul…
So many terrifying examples that raise questions about the practice of cannibalism among sharks: a behavior that seems common, but also ancestral. Indeed, as the scientists point out in the documentary, 300 million years ago, everything suggests that prehistoric sharks were already devouring each other.
National Geographic
Fascinating and very well illustrated, but truly chilling, the documentary even has two subjects in store for us that seem “straight out of a nightmare” (to use the words of the narrator): the case of the ferocious shark, a small parasitic shark with a terrifying appearance, which does not hesitate to attack the great white sharks, and that of the bull sharks, which begin to between-devour… even before they are born! Sensitive souls refrain !
If we strongly advise viewers who already have a phobia of sharks or the youngest to venture into the depths of this documentary, the others will discover fascinating information on this subject, which has not finished questioning the specialists.
National Geographic
“We now know that attacks between sharks are much more widespread than we thought. Today, we are just beginning to better understand the phenomenon”explains Mark Meekan, a biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, at the end of the film.
“Sharks are great predators that take advantage of every opportunity to feed. Sometimes it’s another shark caught on a fishing line, or it’s a shark in an aquarium. Sometimes certain individuals feel capable of to attack a congener who passes within their reach. This is proof that even the largest predators are not immune to an attack in the ocean.