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Hiding in Plain Water

Excuse me for gushing, but great white sharks are bad ass.

Excuse me for gushing, but great white sharks are bad ass. If the fact that they haven’t changed much in millions of years doesn’t mean that they’re true super-predators, I’m not sure what would. The thing is, great whites are hard to study, and not just because of their prodigious toothiness. With their large ranges and small numbers, great whites are hard to find. That makes a new study on their feeding habits by the University of Miami just that much cooler.

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A group led by UM assistant professor Dr. Neil Hammerschlag studied the techniques employed by the great whites in their hunting of Cape fur seals in False Bay, South Africa. The study helps confirm a notion, long held by surfers whose silhouettes look somewhat like a seal’s, that great whites always stalk their prey from below. While that in itself isn’t surprising, Hammerschlag’s research, published in Marine Biology Research, showed that the sharks camouflage themselves by taking advantage of water’s light-scattering properties.

Read the rest at Motherboard.