[narrator] From high-speed attacks
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to pack hunts...
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Sharks have evolved to feed in extraordinary ways.
But how do they do it?
When you're that big, that fast, that powerful,
you can eat anything you want.
[narrator] Now leading scientists and filmmakers
brave all to unlock the science behind
five of the world's ultimate shark feeding events.
[man] Whoa. Amazing.
[narrator] From a 7-ton whale...
[man] We were witnessing a major feeding event.
[narrator] To the feast that feeds 700 sharks...
You're about to witness some of the greatest shark chow downs.
[diver] Ah.
[narrator] It's winter off South Africa's east coast,
and one of the biggest chow down events on Earth
is about to take place.
Hundreds of millions of baitfish are swept north
on cold water currents.
Trapped by land to one side and warm water on the other,
they form dense, black schools,
some over 15 kilometers long.
Known as the sardine run,
this unique event is like a dinner bell.
Hundreds of sharks head to the feast.
Blacktips...
spinners...
and copper sharks form one of the greatest gatherings
of hunting sharks on Earth.
And they're not alone.
Vast super pods of over one thousand common dolphins
track the growing shoals,
followed by huge flocks of birds,
and leviathans,
like the 17-meter-long Bryde's whale.
Every year, for the last 10 years,
cameraman Morne Hardenberg has set out
to find the sardine shoals.
[Morne Hardenberg] The sardine run goes through cycles.
Some years are really good.
Some years no sardines come though the area.
We never know before the time,
so you just have to be there and hope for the best.
[narrator] In 2010, Morne got lucky.
[Morne] We looked up onto the horizon
and we just saw flocks of birds raining down into the ocean.
And we knew that there was potentially a bait ball there,
so we raced over there.
Then when we got there,
you could actually see the fish boiling on the surface.
Dolphins were working the bait ball hard.
It's mind-blowing how fast things happen.
[narrator] The currents push the sardines
closer and closer to shore.
The ocean's ultimate chow down has begun.
[Morne] But when I got into the water,
there was a mass load of sharks below the bait ball,
but they were just slowly cruising and circling.
I was just amazed to see how many sharks
and how many dolphins there really were.
It was mind-blowing.
Dolphins were spinning.
I could hear them communicating with each other,
and they were pushing this bait ball up to the surface.
[dolphins squeaking]
[narrator] Trapped, the terrified fish
have nowhere else to go.
[Morne] And once they get it up to the surface,
that's when the birds start taking advantage of it.
[birds squawking]
Once the birds start hitting the water,
it's like cannon fire going off.
It's literally like being in the middle of a war zone.
[narrator] Diving from heights of 30 meters,
the Cape gannets hit the water at 100 kilometers per hour.
[dolphins squeaking]
With the bait ball at the surface,
finally, the sharks join the feast.
[Morne] Took one shark to go through this ball
and once the one shark went through and started feeding,
it's almost like he pulled a trigger
and then more just came in.
It was just chaos with sharks everywhere.
The sharks, they swim straight into it,
with their mouths open,
and take as many bites as they possibly can.
And you can actually see all the scales of the sardines
coming out of their gills.
When you're in the water with a bait ball this size,
it makes you feel really small.
[narrator] But some 20 minutes into this extraordinary event,
Morne was about to feel even smaller.
A 40-foot Bryde's whale joins the chow down.
The few remaining fish scatter.
The feast is over.
[groaning]
[Morne] Your heart is pounding.
At the end of the day,
it takes a while before you calm down from an event like that.
So what really struck me from this bait ball
was how patient the sharks were
and how they waited for the dolphins to do all the hard work
before they came in and made their move.
These sharks are smart.
Doesn't matter what shark species they are,
they're working together to get the most out of the bait ball
before the bait ball either escapes
or the bait ball is finished.
[narrator] Taking advantage of the dolphins' hard work
is one thing,
but three years later, Morne captured rare evidence
the sharks are capable of far more than just freeloading.
[Morne] We were following birds around,
and we looked out on the horizon,
all the birds were piling into the water.
What was interesting to see was there were no dolphins
working around the bait ball on the surface,
just the birds going in.
And when we got into the water...
Literally I've never seen so many sharks in my life.
There was not one dolphin, just sharks,
probably at least 300 sharks.
[narrator] With no one to herd the fish,
Morne assumed the sharks would go hungry.
He was wrong.
[Morne] What they were doing
was they were bringing this bait ball up to the surface
and trapping it up to the surface all by themselves,
and that was the very first time that we actually saw a bait ball
being formed just by sharks and no dolphins.
[narrator] The sharks start to herd the ball
toward the surface,
creating a giant tornado of fish.
The terrified shoal moves as one.
Called the "predator confusion effect,"
it makes it difficult for sharks to hunt.
But the sharks have strength in numbers.
At least three different species of sharks
seemingly cooperate,
trying to keep the ball stable on the surface to feed.
But it's the spinners and blacktips
who appear to do most of the work,
trying to keep the ball trapped so they can all chow down.
The sharks gorge themselves until they can't eat any more.
[Morne] What was really impressive on this bait ball
was the fact that the sharks did all the work.
They found the shoal of fish,
they got the shoal of fish into this frenzy,
where the shoal became a bait ball,
and then they pushed this bait ball
all the way up to the surface of the water to get it trapped.
The sharks were doing what the dolphins do,
and that makes them smart in many ways.
[Greg Skomal] You know, we tend to think of sharks
as being solitary hunters,
but here's a really great example of a group of sharks
working together for their mutual benefit, you know,
and I think that would have surprised a lot of people.
The sharks that we typically see attack these sardine runs
are the requiem sharks.
These are, you know, closely related species
that include the blacktips, the duskies, the copper sharks
that are moving in, likely from great distances,
to take advantage of these resources.
One thing we know about these requiem sharks
is they have a fairly sizable brain,
bigger than many other shark species,
and we think the complexity of that brain
not only allows them to have really amazing sensory systems,
but also, perhaps, some kind of social network that they follow,
so it's entirely possible that it allows them to work
so cooperatively in these bait balls.
[narrator] Next, discover what white sharks have in common
with serial killers...
in The Great Shark Chow Down.
[narrator] Dawn, near the southernmost tip of Africa.
It's mid-winter and Cape fur seals are weaning their pups.
Over 60,000 adults and their young crowd together
on this granite rock known as Seal Island.
Soon, the pups must go it alone.
But the waters here
are some of the most dangerous on the planet.
Over 300 white sharks patrol the island.
And aerial chow downs can happen at any time.
But adult seals are dangerous prey.
Fierce and fast, they can easily injure a shark.
[Greg] Big seals will fight back.
They're smarter, they're agile,
they can dance around a white shark in the water
very, very easily.
So what they do is they target the juveniles,
which tend to be more naive, they're smaller,
they're easier for them to catch.
[narrator] Now, scientists are beginning to uncover
the secrets of how the white sharks hunt here.
The seals gather in the safety of the shallows.
Just right off of where the seals
are leaving and returning from,
the bottom depth drops off to over 100 feet.
[narrator] It's here the white sharks wait.
With a counter-shaded body, dark at the top,
they're barely visible from the surface.
To reach their fishing grounds,
the young seals make a kamikaze dash for the open ocean.
White sharks can see 10 times better than us in low light,
allowing them to see the silhouetted outline
of the seals.
Reaching speeds of over 30 kilometers an hour,
the white shark launches three meters into the air.
It's the ultimate surprise attack
from a perfectly designed ambush hunter.
When we look at the white shark,
we can see it's really, really well adapted.
It's made up mostly of muscle, called fast-twitch muscle.
That allows the shark to accelerate
very, very, very quickly.
We look at the shape of the white shark.
It's like a missile.
It's capable of not only protruding those jaws,
but exerting incredible force on its prey item.
[narrator] But despite being perfectly adapted
to ambush their prey,
scientists have long wondered
if these attacks need brains as well as brawn.
[Neil] As a scientist, we only see the final part of the attack
which is the moment that the shark meets the seal,
but we don't know anything actually about the precursor,
the hunting stage.
Whether the sharks were randomly hunting,
just, you know, going for a seal when the opportunity was there,
or if there was a little more hunting strategy involved,
something happening below the surface.
[narrator] To answer that question,
Neil took an unusual step.
Teaming up with a criminologist,
they applied FBI profiling techniques
normally used to hunt serial killers.
Little did we know that this tool would be applicable
to our research on white shark attacks on seals.
[narrator] Treating Seal Island like the site of a crime scene,
the science team plotted the exact location
of 340 white shark attacks.
At first glance, the attacks looked random,
but the FBI tool found a pattern.
[Neil] The white sharks showed a clear search base,
or anchor point,
and what this meant is that the sharks were not hunting,
you know, randomly, that they were stationing themselves
prior to launching an attack in a spot that was optimal.
[narrator] Like human serial killers,
the white sharks were hunting their victims strategically,
and carefully choosing the best locations
to launch their strikes.
Getting this type of information in the shark world
where their movements and their behaviors are otherwise hidden
and invisible to us under the water's surface,
I mean, this is just amazing.
[narrator] And when they ran the data again
looking at sharks of different sizes,
another amazing pattern started to emerge.
[Neil] The largest sharks had very well defined,
small, focused anchor points,
and they had much higher success rates.
Whereas the smaller sharks,
their hunting was much more dispersed over a larger area,
and their success rate was less than 45% overall.
This is clear evidence of potential learning
in which that learning actually affords them
higher hunting success rates.
[narrator] Far from mindless killers,
Neil's work revealed adult white sharks
learn from their mistakes,
honing their skills as they age,
they become increasingly deadly.
[Neil] An adult great white off of Seal Island
has a success rate on average over 70%.
If you compare that to, like, a lion,
their success rate's only 12%.
[narrator] Next, how a vital ocean event
feeds more than 200 sharks...
[man] Whoa. Amazing.
[narrator] ...in an epic 7-ton chow down.
[narrator] From aerial acrobats to group attacks,
sharks have evolved to hunt in extraordinary ways.
But these master opportunists don't just kill,
they also scavenge.
When a whale dies at sea, it's called a whale fall.
And it can trigger one of the biggest feeding events
in the ocean.
Hundreds of different creatures come to the feast.
And sharks are front and center.
[Greg] Whale falls are incredibly important feeding events.
Think of it as the sudden appearance
of an oasis in a desert.
[narrator] Impossible to predict,
studying these events is tough.
So scientists in southern England
took matters into their own hands.
Being towed out to sea, stabilized by buoyancy bags,
is the body of a nine-meter humpback whale.
Found drowned in fishing lines,
a team of scientists led by shark expert Richard Peirce
are taking it back out to sea
to study who comes to the 7-ton chow down.
This was the first whale fall event
to be studied and filmed in British waters;
dramatic, very exciting,
and scientifically very valid and interesting.
And this is one of nature's great feeding events.
It's a natural event,
and it attracts predators and scavengers from miles around.
[narrator] The location for the experiment
is 80 kilometers from the British coast,
in an area called the Celtic Deep.
Every spring, the warm Gulf Stream collides
with the coastal waters here, fueling a feast of plankton,
massive shoals of fish, and hopefully sharks.
80 kilometers from land,
the team drifts with the whale at the surface.
Replicating what happens when a whale dies at sea.
Oil from the whales' blubber leaves a slick,
the currents carry for kilometers and kilometers.
Sharks with their incredible sense of smell
should find it irresistible,
but so far, the only visitors are gulls.
There was trepidation, a little bit of worry,
would any sharks rock up?
[narrator] But 36 hours into the experiment,
the birds start to look agitated.
Something is in the water.
[Richard] Shark! Shark!
There. Look to the left.
[woman] Oh, yes.
-[Richard] See it? -[woman] Yeah, yeah.
[Richard] Suddenly, there was the blue back of a blue shark.
It was absolutely breathtaking.
Don't break.
[woman] There we go.
[narrator] At one and a half meters, it's a young adult.
[Richard] Minutes later, we had one almost double the size,
probably about 8-foot.
[narrator] With the first sharks in the area,
the dive team deploys.
Blue sharks have been responsible
for four recorded fatalities.
[man] Blue shark, blue shark.
[narrator] While attacks are extremely rare,
the dive team needs to be careful.
One of the North Atlantic's top predators
is about to chow down on 7 tons of whale.
With every head shake, more than 50 razor-sharp teeth
saw off mouthful after mouthful.
The recycling of some 15 million calories of whale
is underway.
And soon, more and more blues arrive.
Most are female or juveniles.
Seasonal visitors to the UK,
blue sharks undertake one of the most epic journeys
in the North Atlantic.
Traveling from as far away
as the east coast of North America,
some ride the Gulf Stream east,
to feed in the UK's rich waters.
[Richard] Many of these sharks are just from the Atlantic,
and finding this whale fall will have really been a bonanza.
By the end of day two,
we estimated something like 50 sharks.
It quickly became clear
that this was something really special.
[narrator] Already, the whale chow down
is breathing life back into the ocean.
The oily slick coming from the whale
now extends for tens of kilometers.
The blues are eating every part of the whale.
Blubber is one of the most energy-rich foods
on the planet.
Every pound contains more than 7,000 calories.
With sharks up to 2.7 meters,
the team sees some of the largest blue sharks
ever filmed in these waters.
But as numbers continue to grow,
the mood changes underwater.
[Richard] We noticed a behavioral change,
almost as if a bit more competition was creeping in.
The divers started getting bumped.
[man] Light, light, light, pull up, pull up, pull up.
[narrator] Sharks bump prior to an attack.
It's how they assess what's food and what's not.
[Richard] The only sensible decision to make
was to pull the divers out.
[man] They're all coming out.
[narrator] Next, as shark numbers soar...
[Richard] Whoa. Amazing.
[narrator] ...more than 200 blue sharks
come to the 7-ton chow down.
[narrator] For two days scientists have been floating
with the body of a 7-ton whale, which drowned in fishing lines.
Whale falls are hugely important ocean feeding events.
The team is studying who comes to the feast.
Over 50 blue sharks have now joined the chow down.
[man] Light, light, pull up, pull up, pull up.
[narrator] After they started bumping divers,
conditions are now too dangerous to be in the water,
so a remote operated vehicle, or ROV, is deployed.
[Richard] First we saw smaller blues
sort of hanging around the outside,
and then as we got in closer and closer to the whale,
they were bigger sharks and many, many more of them.
Whoa! Amazing.
Absolutely breathtaking.
[narrator] The team estimates there are now
well over a hundred sharks gathered for the chow down.
And looking down into the depths,
there's blues stacked on top of each other,
ll the way down to at least 30 meters.
[Richard] We were witnessing a major feeding event.
It was quite extraordinary.
[narrator] From the air, there are sharks racing in
on the scent trail.
How far they've come,
nobody will ever know.
By late afternoon the team estimates
there are at least 150 sharks.
Most are female.
Why there are so few males is a mystery.
But hardly any seem to make the big clockwise migration
around the Atlantic.
I went to my bunk that night and struggled to sleep,
and actually gave up and came up on deck
to make sure I wasn't having a dream.
[narrator] Day four, and it's bad news for the project.
We'd hoped to study the whale for at least a week,
and I was devastated when a storm cut short our research.
[narrator] The whale is sunk to the seabed.
The floats replaced with ballast to help it sink.
As the humpback starts its final dive,
the blue sharks stay with it.
They follow its slow descent down.
As the whale passes through 30 meters, the temperatures plummet.
And gradually the light begins to fade.
Whale fall occurs at 86 meters.
Only the larger blues seem to follow the whale down.
But then, after just a few minutes, they leave.
Temperatures down here are just 10 degrees.
[Richard] These sharks are not going to stay very long
at low temperatures,
because they've got to get their temperature back up again.
[narrator] Now it's time for the deep sea scavengers.
Sharks, like sixgills, are known to feed on whale falls.
These living fossils can grow up to five meters long.
Able to survive in depths of over 2,500. meters,
and temperatures as low as five degrees.
A single whale fall is like a bonanza in these barren depths.
For the blue sharks, it's time to leave.
These ocean wanderers will ride the currents south,
in search of their next meal.
Over four days at the surface, the blue shark chow down
is thought to have fed at least 200 mouths.
15% of the whale has been eaten,
and over 2 million calories has given new life to the sharks.
For scientists, it's been a rare glimpse into a feast
that happens around the world's oceans.
[Greg] This event with 200 blue sharks
is an incredible chow down.
It tells us how important these whale falls are
to the species living in this open ocean environment.
They only encounter food every now and then,
so they're moving around from patch of food to patch of food,
and they have to also develop multiple strategies.
In the case of the blue shark,
they not only take advantage of whale falls,
there's even evidence looking at their gills
that they're able to sift small, tiny, shrimp-like creatures
out of the ocean's environment.
Sharks have adapted over time through evolution
to all these different environments,
and they've done it so well.
Wherever there's food, they're gonna find it.
[narrator] Next, what happens when 700 sharks
join the ultimate nighttime chow down?
[diver] Ah.
[narrator] A remote atoll in the Pacific is home
to one of the greatest
nighttime chow downs on the planet.
A UNESCO biosphere reserve,
Fakarava Atoll in French Polynesia
is 55 kilometers long.
At its southern end, a narrow, 90-meter-wide channel
cuts through its barrier reef.
And it's here one of the densest gatherings of sharks
on the planet occurs.
Over 700 gray reef sharks mass in the channel,
riding the strong current.
For the past 8 years, a team of experts
led by cinematographer Laurent Ballesta
have traveled to this remote atoll
to investigate how such an extraordinary number of sharks
can survive here.
When you count them,
and you reach 700 sharks in this little channel,
it's quite hard to see how the channel can feed so many sharks.
There is not enough fish.
[narrator] So what was feeding this huge army of sharks?
By day, the science team noticed the sharks rest,
swimming into the currents to conserve their energy.
But at every full and new moon,
they noticed something extraordinary.
Huge shoals of reef fish gather in the channel to spawn.
It was the sharks' chance to feed.
[Laurent] It's not like a supermarket, the channel.
It's more like a conveyor belt in the sushi restaurant,
so the food is passing and the sharks are just waiting.
[narrator] Driven by the cycles of the moon,
as one species finished spawning, the next arrived.
It was an endless cycle of free food for the sharks.
But the biggest chow down was yet to come.
Every June, the arrival of the full moon
triggers the biggest of the Fakarava spawning events.
18,000 groupers here in this place,
and that was the highest density known in the world so far.
[narrator] The team noticed the sharks
were not hunting the groupers during the day.
The hunt had to be happening at night.
Using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras
and time-splice technology,
what the team discovered next was extraordinary.
The sharks, which had spent the day
floating in the currents at mid depth,
were all now at the bottom of the channel,
and the hunt was on.
The first time we went down
and we start to be bumped by the shark,
it was scary.
[bleep]
The feeling was unbelievable.
I never see something with so much action, so much behavior,
so much energy in the water, in all my diving life.
[narrator] Slowly, dive after dive,
the team started to reveal the secrets
of how Fakarava's gray reef sharks hunt.
Hiding in the coral, the fish are hard to flush out.
So the gray reef sharks have to be smart.
Following smaller whitetip sharks around,
which can swim in and out of small gaps,
they appear to let them flush out the groupers
before moving in for the kill.
An all-night chow down on a scale rarely seen before
is soon underway.
The gray reefs mob the fish.
Escape routes blocked, they make kill after kill.
For the fish, the channel
turned into a kind of trap
that's really not easy for them to escape.
The sharks are everywhere.
I never see something like that before.
I never seen something so intense.
[narrator] Hunting together gives the sharks
an advantage over the groupers.
If one loses, the other gains.
It's a unique sort of cooperation.
[Laurent] The shark behavior is a bit like the wolf,
but the shark never share the prey, they just fight for it.
[narrator] Across the reef, the shark pack uses the moonlight
to make attack after attack.
The chow down is so savage many get injured.
Finally, as the light of the moon goes out,
the sharks can feast no more.
The ocean's greatest nighttime chow down is over.
Just before dawn,
the surviving groupers take their chance to spawn.
And for 30 minutes, groups of males chase the females,
releasing clouds of sperm and eggs into the water.
A new generation of groupers
will face the sharks of Fakarava next year.
Next, meet the cheetah of the sea...
[man] Shark!
[narrator] ...and the fastest chow down on Earth.
[narrator] From plankton-eating giants,
to turtle-hunting tigers,
sharks have evolved to become
the ocean's master opportunists.
[Greg] I am forever amazed with sharks, you know.
It's over 500 species that have permeated
all the different waters and environments of the world.
When I look at all these different kinds
of feeding events,
I'm reminded about how adaptable this group is.
The reason they've persisted for over 400 million years,
and that's because they're successful.
From plankton to plants to bait balls to whales,
sharks have exploited every imaginable feeding opportunity.
[narrator] And there's one shark that's capable of going after
the very fastest prey in the ocean.
Off South Africa's Cape Peninsula,
underwater cameraman Morne Hardenberg
is on a new mission to film the fastest underwater chow down.
Meet the cheetah of the sea,
the shortfin mako.
We know their diet consists of fast-moving fish
like bonito, mackerel and tuna,
but we don't really know how they actually hunt these fish.
[narrator] One of the most energetic sharks,
a mako spends most of its life alone,
cruising the high seas
with occasional trips into coastal waters.
With a top speed of 70 kilometers an hour,
they're the fastest shark on Earth.
[Greg] What's really cool about the mako is,
like the white shark, it's warm-blooded.
It can elevate its internal body temperature,
so it's warmer than the surrounding sea water.
Not many species of fish can do that.
But the fast ones can.
Its tail is built like the tail of a tuna fish,
which allows it to propel through the water
with great speed and efficiency.
[narrator] But all this bio-engineering
comes at a high cost.
Makos burn energy so fast,
they need to eat more than almost any other shark.
Consuming the equivalent of some 4% of their body weight
every single day.
Because of its capacity to accelerate to great speed,
the mako shark can almost eat anything.
[narrator] But to find out how they do it,
Morne needs to deploy his torpedo cam.
He plans to tow these dummy fish
next to this special designed rig,
with a high-speed camera inside.
[Morne] Spent about five months modifying this camera,
trying to make it as natural as possible,
'cause what we're after is the actual hunting behavior.
[narrator] 50 kilometers offshore, the team is ready.
Accelerating to speeds of 50 kilometers an hour,
they begin trailing the torpedo cam through the water.
[man] Shark!
[narrator] And 4 hours into the operation, a shark is spotted.
[Morne] I see it, I see it. It's coming. It looks interested.
[narrator] Filmed at 600 frames per second,
the mako strikes at 32 kilometers an hour.
[Greg] What I love about this footage is now we can observe
a mako shark doing what it does best,
that's chasing down a prey item,
latching on to it, and tearing it off.
[narrator] By targeting the tail,
the mako shark disables its prey.
In essence, you're removing the propeller of a boat
and it can't do anything,
and once you've done that, you've incapacitated it,
makes it a lot easier to eat.
And that's really a wonderful strategy.
Use your own body weight and your own body drag
in order to separate a chunk of flesh from your prey item,
so you can feed effectively and get away from that prey item
should it decide to turn around and hurt you.
[narrator] It's yet another different chow down strategy.
A unique approach that has allowed the mako
to corner the fast food market,
and survive in the vast desert of the open ocean.
From these barren waters, to the frozen poles,
wherever there's food, sharks are never far away,
taking advantage of any feeding opportunity.
But today sharks worldwide are in trouble.
From makos to blues, all sharks are in decline.
And the ocean's greatest chow downs
may soon be a thing of the past.
[Richard] We're taking millions of blue sharks
out of the North Atlantic every year.
They're being caught with no limits.
This is a terrible tragedy.
[narrator] And across the world,
from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean,
the story is the same.
Our oceans are in trouble.
Ecosystems are falling.
By netting and over-fishing,
that is the biggest problem we're facing now.
And we see the impact on the sardine run.
We see the impact of over-fishing
which has caused the sardine stocks
to collapse on the west coast.
Each year we're on the sardine run,
you can't help but feel that this might be the last one.
[Greg] As top predators, sharks are critically important
to the marine ecosystem.
Everywhere you look, sharks are front and center.
So the more we know about their feeding strategies,
the better equipped we are to protect the ocean.
[narrator] Without them, all marine life is in trouble.