Tiger Shark

Fascinating facts about the Tiger Shark

• The tiger shark has the widest food spectrum of any shark, preying on everything from tiny crustaceans to fish, seals, birds, squid, octopuses, sea turtles, sea snakes, dolphins and even other sharks. It also eats a surprising range of man-made debris such as licence plates and tires, earning it the nickname "garbage can of the sea". Adult sea turtles appear in up to 20.8% of stomachs, showing a notable preference where they are common.
• Orcas are the only recorded natural predators of tiger sharks.
• A pregnant female caught off Australia measured 5.5 m in length and weighed 1 524 kg, approaching the extreme size range for the species where females rarely exceed about 5 m. Very large females can surpass 1 300 kg, and unverified reports claim individuals up to 7.4 m and 3 110 kg, though such sizes await scientific confirmation.
• Fuvahmulah in the Maldives is recognised as the site of the world's largest known tiger-shark aggregation, with researchers documenting at least 239 individual sharks around the island. The sharks show unusually high site fidelity, especially adult females that repeatedly return to the same waters. Scientists attribute this to the warm temperatures and reliable food supply that make the area ideal for gestation and overall survival.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

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.

Tiger Shark photographed on Feravox

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