Thinking he had spotted a “tuna boil”, and thereby found his own prey, a Louisiana fisherman soon realised he had instead stumbled across a huge group of sharks engaged in a feeding frenzy.
“Never seen anything like it,” Dillon May told Storyful, to whom he provided video of the remarkable scene.
The sharks, May said, were feeding on a large pod of menhaden, a small fish, common off the eastern US, that is preyed upon by other fish and mammals including humpback whales, and which the Nature Conservancy calls “the most important fish in the sea”.
May said he and his girlfriend, Kaitlyn Dix, were about 15 miles off Venice, Louisiana, and on a friend’s boat, which took on water as the sharks thrashed around it.
“The sharks had found the pod and pushed them up against the boat to feast on them,” he said.
According to Noaa Fisheries, part of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, sharks “can go up to approximately six weeks without feeding” before entering an “eating phase”.
Sharks, the agency says, “will eat anything”. Objects found in sharks’ stomachs have included “tires, license plates, a fur coat, a chicken coop and even a full suit of armor.
“But generally, sharks are omnivorous, which means usually they just eat meat and plants. If there is not an abundant supply of meat in the area, they will resort to eating sea vegetation.”
