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
Some animals do, but with hunting bigger animals, comes much bigger risks. It takes an entire pride of lions to hunt an elephant, and that elephant has to be alone. Even then the lions risk having multiple lions die to do it. If you win, lots of food, If you lose lots of dead. Most animals just find it easier to hunt smaller prey.
It’s not easy to get a bite off a body that’s basically floating in the water without hands to get a grip on it and make it not float away. The only way is to take a bite of an appendage like fins or flippers. Only those appendages are the ones that can move fast enough to cause serious bodily harm. So, to sum it up, it’s not worth it.
Go watch how long it takes for a shark to to a single bite out of a dead whale. Then imagine trying to pull that off while it’s alive and ready to turn around and kill you.
Their is a species of shark that does just that. It’s called the cookie cutter shark because it takes little disc or puck shaped bites out of the hide of the whale with its specially-designed jaws. Of course, it is a very small species of shark and has to swim away quickly to avoid the whale’s wrath, so it is less like a scary predatory shark and more like a pest, kind of like a mosquito or a horse fly.
The same reason a barn cat doesn’t just take a bite out of a cow. The cow may not be in the habit of hunting barn cats, but biting something will cause a pain response.
One hit from your much larger and more powerful prey means you’re injured or dead. Injury is significantly more often a death sentence for wild animals than for us as well.
If you’re usually seen walking, does it make any sense to assume that you can’t run?
They aren’t slow. They *look* slow. That is a key difference. Your brain interprets their fin moving flow relative to their body, or them taking so long to move by, and doesn’t do the math that the fin is 12 feet long and the tip is moving at 80 mph, or it is swimming by you at 20 mph. Whales can and do move plenty fast, and a smaller thing might move fast enough to dodge, but one hit from the mac truck speed and weight fin and you are dead. One hit from the bus speed and dozen bus mass body and you are dead.
Besides whales being much stronger/tougher than a shark can reasonably face without risking being killed, most cetaceans are social animals and tend to travel in pods. If a predator tried to take a bite out of a whale calf, the entire pod would be on it before it could process the taste. Imagine Maximum Overdrive by Stephen King, where cars and trucks are actively chasing and killing people, and you can get a good comparison of how screwed a predator antagonizing a pod would be.
> When I would be a shark and came across a whale, no matter its size, I would bite off its fins and start eating.
My most important takeaway from this conversation is that OP was once a shark and regularly feasted on a buffet of larger marine life.
Predators who are good enough to live for generations are experts on risk management. An injured predator is generally a dead predator. Sharks have some sort of natural understand that going after a blue whale just isn’t worth it. Sharks have been hunting the seas for longer than trees have been growing on land. Their system works.
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