[Image: Animalia]
Few creatures on this planet command both awe and terror quite like the great white shark. They’re apex predators, the undisputed royalty of the ocean.
But lately, these creatures of the deep have been washing up dead, from the shores of South Africa, Australia and now even Canada.
In South Africa, it is a pair of killer whales with a penchant for shark liver that seems to be the cause of the empty waters in Gaansbaai, once heralded as the shark capital of the country. The orcas in Australia seem to have the same tastes.
But scientists are also pacing their labs in other countries where sharks are washing up on the shores.
The New York Times reports that for a whopping thirty years, the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperator (CWHC) never had a single great white shark show up dead on their watch. Then, bam—starting in August 2023, five carcasses beached themselves on the shores of eastern Canada, like some morbid calling card from the sea.
The weird part is that some sharks showed no injuries, no signs of a scuffle—just stone-cold dead. But as the tissue samples piled up and the smell of mystery thickened, scientists noticed a chilling pattern: many of the sharks had swollen, enlarged brains.
The cause? That’s still the big, murky blue mystery, Futurism reports, leaving scientists scratching their heads and the ocean keeping its secrets.
“Three of these five seem to have the same potentially infectious disease affecting their brain,” Megan Jones, a veterinary pathologist at CWHC, told the NYT. “We need to know more about what that is.”
Accounting for another four great white carcasses that turned up on US beaches, the grim death toll has risen to nine.
Necropsies have revealed a grim twist: most of the beached great white sharks were suffering from meningoencephalitis—a nasty condition where brain tissue gets inflamed.
Picture this: a shark’s brain swelling so much that it presses against its skull, scrambling its ability to swim. For a creature built for precision and raw power, that’s a death sentence.
Now, here’s where things go from weird to downright baffling. Meningoencephalitis isn’t unheard of in sharks, but there’s usually a glaring culprit, like an infection waving a big red flag. This time there is no obvious cause. And just to add to the confusion, some of the sharks were found with full bellies—so starvation’s off the table too.
Not all the sharks showed signs of brain inflammation during necropsies, even though at least one had exhibited wild, erratic behaviour before meeting its fate.
“I feel very strongly that there’s something significant going on,” Alisa Newton, chief veterinarian for the shark research group OCEARCH, told the NYT.
Whatever’s messing with these apex predators isn’t just playing by the rulebook—it’s throwing it into the ocean and watching it sink.
It doesn’t help that funding for shark science is dismal, while there is very little known about the death rate of sharks on the Atlantic coast in the first place.
[Source: Futurism]