Using a drone, Toby Nicol filmed and photographed an interaction between a tiger shark and a sperm whale. He called it “the craziest encounter I’ve seen to date,” and he ended up winning an award for his work. Perhaps what makes the footage so interesting is the story behind the interaction. It’s definitely not as it seems.
At first glance, it looks like a sperm whale is surfacing for air, and a tiger shark is swimming in the narrow space between the whale’s rostrum and the surface of the water. In reality, the shark is biting chunks off the sperm whale’s face, because the massive marine mammal is dead.
“A 3.5-4m [11.5-13-foot] tiger shark lifts above the water threshold as it glides over the nose of a large deceased sperm whale looking for tender flesh to eat,” wrote Nicol in his Instagram video sharing the video. “I drove 2 hours per day before starting work at 7am over 3 days to finally get to witness this happen, and within 2 hours of this video, the sperm whale was towed onto land to be buried.”
In a separate post, Nicol further explains that authorities towed the sperm whale to land and buried it with plans to dig up the skeleton in a few years and use it as a display in a museum. He says this process started just an hour or so after he was there with his drone.
See a tiger shark circling and eating a dead sperm whale here: