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When predators collide

By Strega

In the sea there are the big and there are the small, but there is no-one who is not prey. The smallest are fed on by the next larger, and so on, up to the very largest - and even they are eaten, by packs of the smaller or by their own kin. At the very least, even the strongest must eventually die, and then there is no shortage of hungry mouths.

Some of the small are mere plants, but everything else has some way to at least try to avoid being eaten.

In the case of the herrings and some other small fish, one defense is called a bait ball. Tens of thousands congregate into a great flashing mass of fish, confusing predators with what appears to be a single enormous creature.

But the predators are not fooled for long. Tuna and sailfish punch right through the ball, swallowing what fish they can and injuring others for later capture. The ball gradually dwindles as it is worn away, but usually many of the small fish survive.

Sometimes even the greatest of predators find a bait-ball and realize that it is potential food. And sometimes, very rarely, two great predators might try for the ball at once, and this can end very badly for one or both.

She was among the largest of her kind, a great white shark twenty feet long and three tons in mass. Battle-scarred and experienced, she did not hesitate for a moment when she saw the flashing ball of herring. She simply lunged into it, jaws stretched wide, aiming to swallow anything she encountered. If that was merely herring, well and good, but a tuna would fit down her throat too, or even a swordfish, though its titular sword would cause her some discomfort before it was digested. It had happened before and she was still here to recount the tale, whereas the swordfish wasn't.

She burst through the mass of small fish with eyes shut to protect them, and opened them only just in time to see the shadow of the vast maw hurtling toward her. Another, still larger creature had had the same idea. There was no time to swerve aside and no time to stop; the two great creatures met with a massive thump, one wedging itself half inside the other.

The impact confused them both. The whale shark, nearly twice as long as the white and not the ocean's smartest creature, had swum phlegmatically toward the bait-ball with jaws agape only to have its gullet suddenly rammed full of...something. The white shark, for her part, had always been the biggest and the strongest. Other sharks, even her own kin, had sometimes disappeared down her gullet. She herself had never been in one and the fleshy walls compressing in from all sides confused her greatly. She thrashed her tail and wriggled, and unknowingly sealed her fate.

For a long moment the impact had stunned the whale shark, and when it recovered it found its great maw wrapped around something far bulkier than its usual meals. Its throat, too, was stretched around something massive, stretched almost painfully tight. It was used to mouthfuls of herring, sardines, or more often than that mere plankton - little prey, in large masses, easy to swallow. Not a single great lump of wriggling meat. It was ready to heave this lump back up and swim off looking for smaller fare.

But as the great white shark began to struggle it triggered a predatory impulse. Any predator will dash after fleeing prey if even the slightest bit hungry, and sometimes if not hungry at all. As the smaller shark wriggled in its gullet its instincts aroused. It tensed its throat harder than ever before and with one enormous gulp it swallowed the great white shark almost to the tail fins.

The great white tried to gape, tried to bite as the great contraction of the swallowing muscles pushed it deeper, but the thick flesh around it kept its jaws squeezed shut even as half of its body was forced past a rubbery valve into the whale shark's long stomach. It knew what was happening now, though it did not know what was eating it. Over its long life many a protesting creature had disappeared down its throat, kicking and squirming, and it could only mimic them as the whale shark drifted along with a lesser shark's tail protruding from its maw.

Naturalists would tell you that a whale shark's gullet has a limit to its elasticity, that even a seabird would be spat forth rather than being eaten. Certainly nothing as large as a human, even if it somehow were engulfed in a whale shark's maw, might be swallowed. There was no record of such a thing happening, though divers were prone to play with such beasts and even swim through bait balls as a whale shark fed.

It is difficult to report an incident when one does not survive it, and the whale shark, who had in its time coughed up or shat out SCUBA tanks, swim fins and half digested wet suits now missing their owners, considered the vertical shark fin visible above and below its maw. This was not only a far larger single gulp than it was accustomed to but more food than it tended to take in one meal, but it was too late for second thoughts now. A second great contraction of its gullet forced the white shark's tail fins to fold, and with a straining gulp the last of its meal was swallowed down. Bulged oddly in the middle the whale shark swam peacefully on, no longer interested in the bait-ball. It had all the food it could handle after just one huge gulp.

Stretched out in the whale shark's long stomach the white shark still thrashed, but the enormous thickness of flesh on all sides of her absorbed her struggle. The whale shark twitched and emitted unhappy noises, made queasy by this unprecedented inner struggle, but nothing as minor as a bit of nausea would convince it to relinquish its meal. Slowly the white shark's struggles stilled, and even more slowly the whale shark's stomach began to work.

A thousand little fish are easy to digest individually, their surface area large compared to their mass. A single twenty-foot great white, on the other hand, has much volume and little surface area. The whale shark's stomach acids could work on this huge meal only slowly. Rather than a half-day or day, as with its usual meals, the white shark would take a week or more to pass through its guts. Eventually the acids would eat into the mouth or through the belly and the white would be dissolved from inside and out, but at first only its tough hide was exposed, and that was hard work to digest.

The whale shark was patient. It was full, and content, and if the meal still twitching in its great stomach was a distant relative, well, sharks are made of meat too. They have no bony structure, just cartilage, and that was rather easier to digest than the bones of its occasional human-sized meal. Bit by bit the white shark would be processed by its guts and excreted. In the end nothing would remain but new fat on the whale shark's flanks and a couple of tons of waste.

And one other thing. This great white was well known to naturalists, and a month before a fist-sized tracking device had been shot into its thick hide. The scientists would scratch their heads at the odd movements of their quarry, until the device became part of an actual movement. Eventually it was expelled with other waste, and since it was designed to float if it came loose from the great white, it was tracked down and found on a beach a few weeks after the white shark and whale shark each went after the bait ball.

There would be more head scratching when the tracker was examined. Minor acid damage would be noted at once and the conclusion was inescapable. Something had swallowed the device, and thus the great white, digested the White and shat out the tracker.

For years afterward this would be the subject of hot debate. Surely it must have been merely a chunk of the White that was eaten, one side would argue, but the other side pointed to the obvious lengthy exposure to acid. It had been inside the mysterious predator for a week or more, they noted. Far longer than was needed for a mere chunk, but long enough to digest the entire white shark. The low temperature recorded on its trip through the guts meant it was not a warm-blooded predator, which ruled out an orca or sperm whale. What could possibly have eaten a twenty-plus-foot-long white shark?

It would remain a mystery. Only the whale shark and the White knew what had happened and neither knew all the details. The White did not know what had swallowed it, the Whale wasn't quite sure what it had swallowed, and neither was likely to talk about the incident any time soon.