When I would be a shark and came across a whale, no matter its size, I would bite off its fins and start eating. Same with a big ray. How do those animals survive so long anyway?
In: Biology
It’s the same concept with elephants and say, hyenas. Yes they can peck at it and slowly chip away, but a swing from an elephant means a crushed skull and a dead hyena. Their massive size is their defense/offense. Imagine a truck-sized bread of loaf. Yes you can poke at it and slowly eat it, but if someone throws the entire truck-sized loaf at you, you’d seriously get injured just from the weight alone.
A shark has to actually find these big creatures.
They are huge, but the world ocean is absolutely vast, it dwarfs the total land space on Earth by a vast amount. And out in the open ocean past the shallows its basically a desert as far as how much life exists because the nutrients to drive the food web out there are severely reduced compared to land and shallow sea. Most of the entire southern hemisphere is deep ocean.
It’s hard to just take a bite.
Imagine trying to bite a wall. Pretty hard to get your teeth on it right? Well, same thing for big whales.
Orca whales hunt and kill sharks, so better hope you don’t run into any of them while out looking for a whale to munch on
Whales are essentially just massive blubbery armoured tanks. You could bite it, but you’d have an incredibly hard time causing any serious damage to the whale, where as one slap from a fin or tail would hurt you WAY more. That’s why.
Shark might say, nah fuck it, an orca can send the shark to the air with its massive thrust attacks
Eli5: imagine living in a big gingerbread house. One day you decide to take a big bite out of a door frame and in response the door slams shut on your head. Leave the doors alone, live another day, stick to eating normal cookies.
Do you think whales are harmless just because they don’t have fangs, horns or claws?
So do you. If a bloodlusted toddler came to you and tried to eat your leg, you could easily smack the shit out of him.
Whales do the same, they have enough strenght to easily move around their several tons bodies, so even a simple smack from them can do serious damage. I mean look at this video of an [orca launching a seal in the air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7WGIH35JBE) (0:28), i know orcas are hunters, but it’s just to show the raw strenght of an animal that size. Whales are even bigger and stronger.
For the prey, its life and death when attacked so they tend to fight back with everything they have got. For the predator, its just one meal! A serious injury just to get one meal (unless they are absolutely desperate) is a big big deal, it could prevent them from hunting for a long while. Thus, predators tend to go for easy prey. If driven to it by near starvation they will attack large prey but otherwise they wont risk it because like others have already answered, the large slow animals can pack a mighty punch.
Let’s just say for a second that a shark bites the whale. Then what? It’s just pissed off a giant creature which can swing its tail with extreme force, usually enough to kill a shark and lives in a pod with other whales. The best case is that it gets away with a single bite, but a clean hit kills the shark.
Also just want to challenge one part of this. Whales are not slow. They are extremely fast. Water resistance follows an inverse square cube law, which means that larger animals get to move faster for less energy per KG. Blue whales have a top speed of 50km/h. They’re pretty quick.
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