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The diet of the silvertip shark consists primarily of bony fishes, such as grouper, mackerel, tuna, escolars, lanternfish, flyingfish, wrasses, and soles. Eagle rays, smaller sharks, and octopus are occasionally taken. [2] Larger sharks tend to be more sluggish and take more benthic prey. [13]
As a juvenile, it sometimes acts as a cleaner fish on a reef station; its diet consists of small parasitic crustaceans such as copepods, isopods, and ostracods. [ 10 ] When attached to a host, the remora eats parasitic crustaceans, food scraps from its host's feeding activity, and even some small food captured by filtering water through its ...
The tiger shark must be able to twist and turn in the water easily when hunting to support its varied diet, whereas the porbeagle shark, which hunts schooling fish such as mackerel and herring, has a large lower lobe to help it keep pace with its fast-swimming prey. [38]
Primary piscivores, also known as "specialists", shift to this habit in the first few months of their lives. Secondary piscivores will move to eating primarily fish later in their lifetime. It is hypothesized that the secondary piscivores' diet change is due to an adaptation to maintain efficiency in their use of energy while growing. [4]
A planktivore is an aquatic organism that feeds on planktonic food, including zooplankton and phytoplankton. [1] [2] Planktivorous organisms encompass a range of some of the planet's smallest to largest multicellular animals in both the present day and in the past billion years; basking sharks and copepods are just two examples of giant and microscopic organisms that feed upon plankton.
Like other fish, sharks extract oxygen from seawater as it passes over their gills. Unlike other fish, shark gill slits are not covered, but lie in a row behind the head. A modified slit called a spiracle lies just behind the eye, which assists the shark with taking in water during respiration and plays a major role in bottom–dwelling sharks.
The basking shark is a ram feeder, filtering zooplankton, very small fish, and invertebrates from the water with its gill rakers by swimming forwards with its mouth open. A 5-metre-long (16 ft) basking shark has been calculated to filter up to 500 short tons (450 t) of water per hour swimming at an observed speed of 0.85 metres per second (3.1 ...
They are commonly found attached to sharks, manta rays, whales, turtles, and dugongs, hence the common names "sharksucker" and "whalesucker". Smaller remoras also fasten onto fish such as tuna and swordfish, and some of the smallest remoras travel in the mouths or gills of large manta rays, ocean sunfish, swordfish and sailfish.