Re: Great White Shark hunting techniques -Reply -Reply

["Nicholas R. Longrich" <longrich@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, Scott Horton wrote:

> >On sharks:  Most whales that live in similar environments as the great
> >white are usually pretty big, reducing their chances of becoming a meal.
>  
> It should increase their chance of becoming a meal, though it decreases
> their chance of perishing from it. The sharks could survive nibbling on the
> whales like fleas nibbling on dogs, or like remoras on sharks.
        World's smallest shark: the cookie-cutter shark, whose 
semicircular jaws take hemisperical chunks of flesh from cetaceans and 
porpoises. It's really tiny for a shark, I forget how small exactly.


 It seems
> that to be a predator at the least risk, you either have to be almost as
> large as your prey or very much smaller than it. A pack of deinonychus'
> attacking a large hadrosaur would seem to me to be in a size range that
> could be efficiently stomped on. The pack would suffer too many
> casualties to survive very long, whereas Tyrannosaurus or vampiric :)
> Archeopteryx's might prey successfully on the beast.

        A National Geographic article showed a bunch of lionesses 
taking down a half-ton juvenile elephant, and mentioned that they could 
also take down a half-ton buffalo. The weight of the pack animals roughly 
equalled that of their prey. 

        -nick L.