Wildestanimal/Alamy
The sharks in the Gulf of Mexico have a hunting timetable. We previously thought that all sharks hunted at around the same time – dusk or dawn – but it turns out that different shark species sharing the same space have their own scheduled times for foraging. This might help them share resources and avoid one another.
Karissa Lear at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, was mapping out the activity patterns of sharks in the eastern Gulf of Mexico when she noticed there were differences between species.
This was unexpected, so she and her colleagues looked more closely at whether different species were partitioning their foraging times. They found that different shark species with overlapping diets share resources by foraging at different times each day.