See scientists dissect a dead great white shark that washed up in South Carolina

great white
Greg Skomal, MA Marine Fisheries

Sharks are one of the most elusive animals a researcher can study. So when a giant great white washes ashore, biologists will jump on the rare opportunity to peer inside.

Advertisement

And then they'll live tweet the dissection, because why not?

On the morning of Dec. 7, a dead, female eight-foot great white shark floated onto the shore of Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina.

A team of biologists from the University of North Carolina Wilmington's (UNCW) Marine Mammal Stranding Program jumped on the opportunity to perform an necropsy to understand how it died and study this threatened predator.

Chuck Bangley, a graduate student at East Carolina University, was invited to sit in on the necropsy at UNCW and — for better or worse — decided to live-tweet the entire dissection.

Advertisement

The reason for the necropsy was to figure out how the large fish died.

Advertisement

"This is a very rare event in our area," Ann Pabst, a marine biologist and professor at UNCW told Earth Touch News Network. "This is an opportunity to learn a great deal of the biology of this really poorly understood and really threatened marine species."

Source: Earth Touch News Network.

Advertisement

The team first cleaned the shark's body and then searched for injuries or parasitic infections before slicing it open.

Source: Earth Touch News Network.

Advertisement

The length of the shark's body was slashed with some bites and punctures, but these were likely caused by other animals pecking at her after she died.

Advertisement

The team confirmed that she was relatively free of parasites and was overall in a healthy condition, despite those gashes.

Source: Earth Touch News Network.

Advertisement

After slicing her open, they saw that she even had food in her stomach — the bones of a black drum fish.

Advertisement

Here's what a black drum normally looks like.

Black drum fish
Louisiana State University/Wikimedia Commons

Black drum fish are commonly found bottom foraging near oyster reefs, shipwrecks and piles along coasts. This means that the shark likely ate it near a structure close to shore.

google street view ss antilla shipwreck
Google

 Source: Chesapeake Bay Program, Chuck Bangley.

Advertisement

Aside from the pile of fish bones, the great white's stomach also harbored a parasitic nematode, which you can barely make out in the center of this photo.

While nematodes can infect and sicken a shark in much the same way that they can sicken humans, this particular great white only had a few of these parasitic worms, leaving it relatively healthy.

nematodes
CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons

Source: Ask A Naturalist, Earth Touch News Network.

Advertisement

The shark's liver also appeared to be in tip-top shape.

Advertisement

And a slice through its body revealed its powerful skeleton and muscles.

Advertisement

While the team found signs of trauma in the shark's throat, they didn't see any signs that it had been caught in fishing apparatus. These kinds of throat lesions are commonly found in pilot whales and usually aren't deadly.

Source: Chuck Bangley

Advertisement

So how did the shark die? The answer is that they still don't know, but temperature fluctuations in the water or environmental shifts may have caused its demise, Bangley said.

Advertisement

The team has shipped samples of the shark's body and tissues to labs around the US. It could be weeks before we know for sure how it died.

 Source: Earth Touch News Network.

To see Bangley's entire account of the necropsy, check out his Twitter feed here.

Research
Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.