Last fall, a tour company in Australia stumbled upon a rare find: a dead whale. But what they had spotted turned out to be even rarer than that, as the video footage captured both sharks and a large saltwater crocodile tearing at the carcass—something no one had ever seen before.
It was an exciting enough observation to catch the attention of Austin Gallagher, chief scientist and CEO of Beneath the Waves. “I saw the post online on Facebook,” he told me, where it had already gone somewhat viral.
Gallagher, a shark expert, admitted to having a ‘closet interest’ in scavenging ecology in particular, so when he saw the video, he got really excited. He quickly reached out to the charter company and the drone pilot to learn more, and worked with them and a couple of his scientific colleagues to write up the observation, which was recently published in Journal of Ethology. Continue reading “Drone Spies Crocodile Eating Dead Whale Alongside Tiger Sharks, Much To The Sharks’ Dismay”
