Hmmm.
Story here.
We find a lot of Bull Shark teeth, and the central ones are perfectly symmetrical like the one depicted - but those GWS do wander from the Atlantic into the Gulf, so one straying into the Bahamas is certainly a possibility. And a bite spanning all the way from the shoulders to the buttocks is very large indeed!
Opinions?
David - JSD?
H/T: Mark!
PS - Mark just sent me this pic with Bull Shark teeth (from the SRMR no less!) - not easy!
PPS - GWS confirmed?
8 comments:
It's certainly feasible it could be a White Shark, there have been some large specimens documented there over the last few years and one I remember which was washed up dead a few years back.
I do think it's a Bull though, there is a slight curvature in the tooth fragment and the size of it would suggest either a good sized Bull or a small White Shark and smaller White Sharks tend to make these kind of attacks only extremely rarely.
The location as well would make me lean more towards Bull as well but of course, I could be wrong.
Thanks David!
Dunno - Mark just sent the pic I've just posted, an the serrations from the Bahamas Shark appear a tad coarser, and the Caribbean Bulls are way smaller than ours = GWS?
If it were a GW tooth it wouldn't surprise me to be honest. I saw the pic on my phone earlier today in low res and thought it could be a Caribbean Reef if not a Bull but seeing a better quality pic now it's clearly not.
Would certainly be interesting if it was a confirmed GWS as I'm struggling to think of any confirmed attacks in those waters by a White Shark in the past
Peter Benchley has seen a gws in the Bahamas:
http://www.sharkfriends.com/sharks/PBarticle.html
I have some inside information that it has been officially confirmed to be a bull shark, which is what most of us believed from the beginning when they were suggesting tiger in the news article.
The size of it doesn't seem to be coming from a GW. It looks like a lower tooth and seems small for a GW.
The tooth looks to be broken off at the base, which would make it about the size that would be visible on a shark.
Thanks Sean, very interesting!
Martin, if it is a Bull then the tooth is an upper central one - the more lateral ones are asymmetric as per Mark's pic, and the lower ones are narrow and much less serrated.
JSD thanks for the great link - very interesting!
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