Breaching Basking Sharks

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Basking sharks breach like white sharks but for different reasons. White sharks leap out of the water (or breach) to capture agile marine mammals such seals and otters. Basking sharks are larger than white sharks and feed mostly zooplankton; they only need to sift their prey, so why expand any effort at breaching?

Read more at New Scientist…

Johnston EM, Halsey LG, Payne NL, Kock AA, Iosilevskii G, Whelan B, Houghton JDR. (2018) Latent Power of Basking Sharks Revealed by Exceptional Breaching Events.. Biol Lett 14(9):20180537. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0537