Great white shark scarred after surviving orca attack

Posted by David Henning on 3 April 2023

A great white shark with scars along its body seems to have survived an attack by the infamous orca pair of Port and Starboard.

The great white was photographed by a marine biologist at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Alessandro De Maddalena near False Bay’s Seal Island in 2017.

He strongly believes that Port and Starboard were behind these scars, especially when considering that the observation took place after orcas were recorded preying on seven-gill sharks in False Bay.

His analysis of the great white’s scars was recently published in the Marine Biological Journal.

Read: Where did the Cape’s great whites go? A new study has the answers

Photographs of the shark’s scars were compared with tooth rake marks of an orca recorded in the winter season in the areas
of Bodø, Kaldfjord, and Skjervoy (Norway), and ‘sixteen parallel scratches can be observed’.

The numbers indicate the twelve scratches on the left matching the twelve teeth in the orca’s left half of the lower jaw and the four scratches matching the first four teeth in the orca’s right half of the lower jaw. Photo by Alessandro De Maddalena

This sighting is especially interesting ‘because it represents the evidence that great white sharks can survive an attack by an orca, and it does not necessarily have to succumb in the confrontation between the two species’ the research paper stated.

‘Perhaps the failure of the attack was due to the fact that the orcas were still perfecting their attack technique,’ he said. ‘Or it could simply be that like any predator, they can fail on a regular basis.’

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