Tiger Shark

Fascinating facts about the Tiger Shark

• Tiger sharks are the ocean's least picky eaters, earning the grim nickname “garbage cans of the sea.” Researchers cutting open their stomachs have catalogued licence plates, tyres, baseballs, suits of armour and even unexploded ordnance alongside the usual fish and seals. A tiger shark can also evert its stomach — turning it inside out through its mouth to flush out anything indigestible, then swallowing it back.
• Its teeth are unlike any other shark's: deeply notched and serrated on both edges like a saw blade, with a sideways-curving tip. This “cockscomb” shape lets a tiger shark saw clean through the shell of a sea turtle — it is one of the only predators on Earth that can crack an adult turtle — and it is the single biggest natural threat to nesting green and loggerhead turtles across the tropics.
• The “tiger” name comes from the dark vertical bars striping a young shark's flanks, perfect camouflage in dappled, sun-streaked shallows. As the shark matures and grows past four metres these stripes fade almost completely, so the largest adults are a near-uniform grey-blue.
• Tiger sharks are among the most prolific breeders of all sharks. After a pregnancy of roughly 13–16 months a female can give birth to a litter of 30 to 80 live pups — occasionally more than 100 — each one a fully formed, independent hunter from the moment it is born.
• Electroreceptors (the ampullae of Lorenzini) dotting their snout let tiger sharks sense the faint electrical fields of hidden prey, and they undertake some of the longest migrations of any shark. Satellite-tagged individuals off Hawaii have been tracked crossing thousands of kilometres of open ocean and returning to the same islands, timing their visits to when albatross chicks fledge and tumble into the sea.

At a glance

About the Tiger Shark

The Tiger Shark is the largest of the requiem sharks and one of the ocean's great generalists — a roaming apex predator found in tropical and warm temperate seas around the world. Reaching over five metres and weighing up to 900 kilograms, it cruises slowly through coastal shallows, reefs, harbours and river mouths under cover of darkness, relying on stealth rather than speed. Second only to the great white in recorded encounters with humans, it owes that reputation less to aggression than to sheer indiscriminate curiosity: the tiger shark will investigate, and often swallow, almost anything it comes across. Yet it is also a keystone of reef and seagrass ecosystems — its mere presence shapes where turtles, dugongs and other grazers dare to feed.

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