It’s still months until Thanksgiving, but people are already talking about Turducken, the Internet’s favorite holiday meal within a meal within a meal. Now, for the people who don’t like to eat meat but still enjoy the delicacy of the ocean-based animals, there is an option for you. And it was discovered in the wild.
A crew from the Orb Lab at the University of Delaware, a group that works toward “releas[ing] the secrets of the ocean,” was doing a routine recapture of sand tiger sharks that had been previously caught and tagged. The group was bating the sharks with the smaller fish called a menhaden. Inadvertently, a 3-foot dogfish swam up and took the bait, only seconds before a full-sized female sand tiger shark swallowed it.
The Orb (Ocean Exploration, Remote Sensing, Biogeography) crew posted it to their Facebook page on July 21.
We caught one large female on our first line Friday, but we were not expecting to catch her like this! This unlucky smooth dogfish couldn’t resist the menhaden used as bait and unfortunately fell victim to one of the top predators in the bay. The dogfish was about 3 feet long and completely swallowed by the sand tiger shark.
Naturally, the Internet loved the photo, branding it “Sharknado 2,” “Sharkception” and other clever shark-related things.
Boatloads of people are afraid of sharks, despite the small number of shark attacks on humans a year. In fact, humans kill 11,417 sharks an hour, according to a startling infographic you can check out here.