iStockNot to alarm anyone but there is apparently something that's just chillin' in the ocean that is capable of devouring an entire great white shark! So basically a SyFy movie come to life.
The Smithsonian Channel's Hunt for the Super Predator documents filmmaker David Riggs and his obsessive quest to find out what happened to the great white shark he tagged and lost off the coast of Australia 11 years ago. Why is this story so compelling (and terrifying)?
Because something ate the shark they were tracking. Now what kind of predator can devour one of Earth's scariest creatures? A creature that was nine feet long?
The evidence supplied by the tag that washed ashore showed that the shark had been swimming at a depth of 1,900 feet when suddenly its temperature spiked considerably. And the only way that could have happened that far down in the ocean is if the shark was in the stomach of another animal.
"The question that not only came to my mind but everyone's mind who was involved was, 'what did that?'" Riggs asks in the documentary. "It was obviously eaten. What's gonna eat a shark that big? What could kill a nine-foot great white?"
Some possibilities that are explored in Hunt for the Super Predator go from plausible (a killer whale, a larger shark) to what we hope are completely ridiculous assumptions (Godzilla, Kaiju).
"Looking at the profile of the animal that ate it, 26 degrees, that's pretty high but not enough to be a mammal, but it's something seriously huge to sustain that temperature," Riggs says. "The larger the animal, the more capable it is of an elevated temperature. The notion of gigantism is well documented in species; to me that's plausible."
Plausible and frightening. And we're never going into the ocean again, because the only things capable of killing a great white shark, according to SyFy's cheesy-as-hell monster movies, are things that will undoubtedly move to humans next.
So here are the suspects, just so we can all prepare for what might be coming:
1. Robocroc
2. A giant octopus-like creature (Bermuda Tentacles)
3. Dinocroc
4. Piranhaconda
5. Giant, intelligent electric eels (Deep Shock)
6. Frankenfish
7. Mega Piranha
8. Sharktopus
9. A giant squid (Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep)
10. Supergator
11. A Plesiosaurus (Loch Ness Terror)
12. Gatoroid
13. Dinoshark
14. Mega Shark
Our money is on the Piranhaconda, and hopefully not Godzilla because neither Aaron Taylor-Johnson nor Matthew Broderick will be able to help us!