What chowed down on a 9-foot great white shark?
(NEWSER) – What wolfs down 9-foot great white shark like a steak dinner?
That's what plagued researchers who had tagged a great white in Australia and found the tag washed up on a nearby beach four months later, Australia's News Network reports. Tag data showed a sudden 1,902-foot plunge and a quick increase in temperature, the latter indicating time spent in an animal's digestive system.
"I was absolutely blown away," says filmmaker Dave Riggs in a documentary coming from the Smithsonian Institute, Hunt for the Super Predator (see some of it on YouTube).
SPOILER ALERT: Researchers theorized that the 9-footer was eaten by a "colossal cannibal great white shark."
Huh? Well according to tracking data, the predator would be roughly 16 feet long and weigh more than 2 tons, reports Geekosystem. No one knows why the attack occurred, but it may have been a territorial issue or the big shark could have just been hungry, Gizmodo Australia reports.
In the end, the film "settled on a hypothesis that makes the most sense to me," writes Casey Chan at Gizmodo Australia. "Big sharks eat little sharks."
More on Newser:
Rising seas wash up WWII skeletons:
Man spend hours talking to spirits.
Is imported Nutella different?
Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.