What Do Sharks Eat?

Many people want to know what do sharks eat, but there is not a simple answer to that question. The diet of a particular shark can heavily depend on a variety of factors including habitat, location, food availability, shark species, and the size of the shark.

The general answer to What do sharks eat is almost anything, but it is heavily dependent on the tastes of each species and the food that is available where it lives. While many sharks are meat eaters, there are smaller species of sharks, particularly bottom-dwellers, that feed on marine life other than fish and mammals.

So, what did Carcharodon megaldon eat? They were heavy meat eating sharks that preyed upon the largest animals in the ocean. Scientists have been able to gather fossil evidence to determine that megalodon ate other megalodons, whales (both baby and adult), seals, dolphins, prehistoric manatees, and other large marine creatures.

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Author: Claire Llewellyn
Publisher: Kingfisher
Product Summary: This gripping book offers amazing insight into the deep-sea lives of the creatures that have perennially captured children's imaginations--where sharks live, what they feed on, how they bear their young.

To completely understand what sharks eat and what megalodon ate, it’s important to understand a bit about shark evolution. Sharks are situational predators that are notorious for evolving to adapt to changing conditions, especially when it comes to their diet.

For this reason, it’s quite possible that evidence has been found of megalodon cannibalism because they may have been feeding on each other towards the end of their lifespan in prehistoric times. After the hungry megalodon exhausted it’s normal food supplies, it’s quite possible that they turned on each other until the megalodon simply died off.

Scientists believe that megalodon had a large appetite, especially compared with more modern sharks. This trait in modern sharks shows how they have evolved since prehistoric megalodon to adapt to a lower volume of food availability in the oceans of the world. If prehistoric sharks contributed to the extinction of other large aquatic creatures, then it’s feasible that modern sharks have had to adapt to having a lower food supply than in prehistoric times.

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Publisher: Princeton University Press
Product Summary:

Everyone's heard of the Great Whites. But most people know little of the hundreds of other types of sharks that inhabit the world's oceans. Written by two of the world's leading authorities and superbly illustrated by wildlife artist Marc Dando, this is the first comprehensive field guide to all 440-plus shark species. Color plates illustrate all species, and detailed accounts include diagnostic line drawings and a distribution map for each species. Introductory chapters treat physiology, behavior, reproduction, ecology, diet, and sharks' interrelationships with humans.

  • More than 125 original full-color illustrations for fast and accurate identification of each shark family
  • Over 500 additional drawings illustrating physical features from different angles
  • Clear identification information for each species with details of size, habitat, behavior, and biology
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  • Geographic distribution maps for each species
  • For professional and amateur shark enthusiasts

While C. megalodon had to consume an enormous amount of food on a regular basis to feed it’s hunger, some sharks found in the oceans today can live for months or even a year from a single large meal. Since these sharks are much smaller, the diet requirements to stay alive are a fraction of what megalodon consumed.

Many people also wonder if sharks eat people. Even though there are shark attacks around the world on a regular basis, deaths from shark attacks are not very common. Generally, a shark will realize that it has bitten something that is not it’s normal diet and release it. Unfortunately, this brief attack still causes a lot of harm and damage to humans, but the consequences could be a lot worse if sharks actually liked the taste of human flesh.

If megalodon was still alive today with humans, that story could be quite different. It really wouldn’t matter whether a megalodon liked the taste of human flesh, because an attack would almost certainly kill a human every single time. Sharks mistake objects in the water that aren’t supposed to be there as marine animals, which is the most common cause of modern shark attacks.

What did Megalodon and other sharks eat?

What did Megalodon eat?

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