Great white sharks' mystery diet uncovered in gripping film

Mystery. Menace. Action and humour. Heroes and villains. Shark Eat Shark — a new documentary starring great white sharks and their intrepid researchers — has all the elements of a great thriller.

But in this suspenseful film whales, not sharks, are the predators striking fear into the viewers’ hearts. Unlike Jaws, this film shows the danger facing white sharks off South Africa’s coastline, from people to orcas hunting as a pack.

The researchers’ discovery about what the white sharks of Mossel Bay eat — smaller sharks are their staple — is the standout feature of the film, solidly backed by scientific evidence.

Despite the white sharks’ aerobatic hunting of seals near Seal Island, breaching from below to catch them in their jaws, most of their hunting appears to be done close to the ocean bed near estuaries.

The underwater action kept the audience spellbound at the Cape Town premier this week. Shark Eat Shark premieres Saturday on National Geographic Wild, launching its annual July SHARKFEST with 72 hours of ocean adventures.

Shark Eat Shark tracks how exuberant shark scientist Enrico Gennari, and fellow scientist Lacey Williams, set up underwater bait traps, take tissue samples off the back of swimming sharks and tracks the white sharks with tags and drones. This is harder than it sounds, yet the team overcomes the obstacles one by one.

What they cannot control is the appetite orcas have developed for South Africa’s white sharks, and the audience was on the edge of their seats every time the killer whales cruised into the bay, killing white sharks and chasing them away.

But over the months, the researchers gathered enough evidence to prove their groundbreaking theory that white sharks are preying on smaller sharks.

After the launch shark scientist Sophu Qoma said: “Two weeks back I saw a great white shark feeding on a spotted gully shark. This was my first proper sighting of it and a great interaction.”

The 2023 SHARKFEST has footage from the US — Cape Cod, Florida, Hawaii, New York, South Carolina — to Australia, the Bahamas, Indonesia, the UK and even Canada, as white sharks are reappearing in the cold waters of Newfoundland.

Two short films will run on National Geographic Africa’s You Tube channel in July, complementing SHARKFEST: Breaking the Surface: Diversity in the Ocean and Marine Ecosystem, featuring Qoma and her diving, and Azillali, They Do Not Sleep, depicting the life of a dark shyshark foetus.

* 'Shark Eat Shark' premieres on Saturday at 6.45pm on National Geographic Wild (DStv 182, Starsat 221) and during the week. SHARKFEST runs for the month of July.

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