A ground-breaking TV show in Shark Week has captured the first ever footage showing a pod of orcas hunt and kill a great white shark.
During the special Shark House, conservationist and TV host Dickie Chivell spent days living on the ocean floor in a purpose build ‘house’ to investigate why sharks being wiped out.
In the jaw-dropping footage captured by a drone, a nine foot white shark is seen lifeless after several killer whales attacked, tearing out its liver.
Its floating corpse can be seen drifting in the ocean, with a pool of blood spreading in its wake.
‘It’s the first footage of killer whales killing white sharks in South Africa,’ biologist and Shark Week regular Alison Towner told Metro.co.uk.
‘It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of natural history footage in world. It’s incredible, it’s harrowing and it’s all of the emotions.’
Towner explores this recent phenomenon further in her own show airing on Shark Week Friday July 29, after noticing some of the white sharks she regularly tracks appear to have gone missing.
Towner told us the attacks on white sharks from orcas were only first recorded in 2017, which ‘might sound like along time ago but ecologically it’s like yesterday’.
‘Nowhere else in the world have white carcasses been washing up post killer whale predation, torn open and missing their livers. It’s mind-boggling to see that first hand – incredible but extremely sinister.
‘I don’t think anyone expected the affects of these events to be so profound.’
Like Tower said, the repercussions have been catastrophic as we’re starting to learn what happens when sharks are pushed out of an eco-system, due to being hunted by orcas and, of course, their main threat humans.
‘Every other species is affected – right down to our critically endangered African penguins,’ said Alison.
‘I always say what’s more scary than an ocean full of sharks is an ocean without them because every species suffers, including humans. Sharks are meditaors of the sea and without them everything collapses.’
Shark House is available to stream on Discovery+. Shark Women airs on Discovery+ tonight in the US at 10pm.
