A ‘cannibal’ great white shark was filmed almost biting a 12-ft rival in two in terrifying footage.
The extremely rare images were captured as part of a series investigating reports of predators preying on their own kind in the wild.
Dramatic footage shows a 12-foot long great white shark being attacked by a much bigger rival as it was eating fishing bait near a boat.
The brutal attack left the smaller shark with two major wounds including a large bite out of the middle of its body.
A great white shark is seen munching on a smaller kind of its own ( Image: National Geographic /SWNS.COM)
Professor Mark Meekan, from the Australian Institute for Marine Science, told National Geographic’s WILD new show Cannibal Sharks that all sharks are cannibals – even fearsome great whites.
He said: “This is an enormous shark. It’s 12-feet long but look at the size of that bite, it’s absolutely massive.
”That’s an immense amount of power you need to take a bite out of another shark like that – you have to be pretty big yourself.
”If I was a betting man, I might even pick another great white shark for that one.
“These things are apex predators for good reason.
“It’s not just one rogue shark attacking other sharks or even one species of shark attacking other sharks, it’s lots of different sharks turning on each other.”
The smaller great whites is left with two big bites on both sides of its body ( Image: National Geographic /SWNS.COM)
Professor Mark Meekan says all sharks are cannibal ( Image: National Geographic /SWNS.COM)
More and more mutilated carcasses are being pulled out of the ocean around Australia’s Gold Coast, the show hears.
Some have been so severely bitten, just the bloody severed heads remain.
Amazingly, new research shows that sharks have been eating each other for millennia.
An examination of fossilised faeces taken from the prehistoric orthacanthus – a shark that swam the oceans 300 million years ago – found it contained fossilised baby shark teeth.
Professor Meekan said: “That shows that 300m years ago these were cannibal sharks. Shark on shark predation is a fundamental trait.”
For some, cannibalism begins in the womb.
There had been mutilated carcasses found in the ocean around Australia’s Gold Coast ( Image: National Geographic /SWNS.COM)
The female sand tiger shark has two wombs and often conceives six or seven embryos in each womb at once.
However, they only ever give birth to two shark pups, a discrepancy which previously baffled scientists.
Now, using incredible scanning technology and DNA breakthroughs, they have discovered that the embryos are often sired by different fathers at different times.
This means that as soon as the oldest embryo develops eyes and teeth it can eat its siblings in the womb.
The sand tiger shark’s taste for its own kind continues throughout its life and marine biologists were stunned in 2016 when a well-fed captive sand tiger shark started to eat its tank mate.
Shark on shark predation is a fundamental trait, according to experts ( Image: National Geographic /SWNS.COM)
It took the eight-year-old female 21 hours to eat the five-year-old male in South Korea, starting with his head.
Some specialists thought the attack must have been a turf war, but Shark expert Doctor Yannis Papastamatiou (CORR), who leads the Predator Ecology and Conservation Lab at Florida International University, believes sharks eat each other purely to sate their hunger.
He said: “They just hunt, it’s a prey source, they’re just food.
“They’re much simpler than mammals which have much more complex reasons for killing each other. It’s very common.”
Cannibal Sharks airs on Monday, July 15, as part of National Geographic WILD’s week-long Sharkfest.
