Large shark hooked off Australia gets devoured by bigger shark as its being reeled in
An epic 4-hour battle to reel in a “massive” shark off Australia came to a bizarre conclusion when it was mercilessly devoured by something much bigger.
Anglers Sammy Hitzke and Shaun Whale suspect it was a bigger shark, but even they aren’t sure.
“There’s always a bigger fish!” Whale lamented on Instagram. “The ocean can be a crazy place, wild adventure.”
It happened as the two avid fishermen were 125 miles off east Australia’s Gold Coast. A YouTube video of the expedition shows Whale hooked what he assumed was a sword fish. However, theories changed as hours passed and the fish refused to surrender.
“This is the hardest fight I’ve ever had. It’s the most insane fight I’ve ever had,” Whale says, as he continues to reel. “Whatever this is, I have so much respect for this fish.”
Later, they realized he was tugging at a shark that was wedged in the jaws of something bigger.
Hitzke was the first to suspect something was wrong when he caught a glimpse of ripped flesh coming at the boat.
“What is going on there?” Hitzke says in the video. “He’s got three-quarters of himself missing.”
They had caught a bigeye thresher shark, but it came aboard as nothing more than a head and tail. Everything in between was chewed away like corn on the cob, leaving only the vertebrae, photos show.
“I’m not going to lie to you. I’m absolutely exhausted, a little bit devastated. But still ... this might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in the ocean,” Whale says in the video.
“I’ve done a lot of fishing, spent a lot of time out in the Big Blue, and not once do I think it was a thresher shark that got eaten by something that I can only imagine was absolutely massive. ... It’s a pretty tough world out there.”
Whale goes on to demonstrate the shark’s tail fins exceed his height. It also had a hook in its mouth from a past encounter with an angler, he said.
The exact length of the shark was not provided, but bigeye threshers can exceed 16 feet off Australia, experts say.
Hitzke’s video has been viewed more than 350,000 times since being posted April 3, and ignited social media speculation of what may have eaten their catch. Many suspect it was a giant squad, while others wonder if it was multiple sharks.
“There must be some insane creatures down there,” one commenter wrote on YouTube.
“What kind of fish does that to another fish,” Matt Smith asked.
“It’s scary what’s out there!” Joel Davidson posted.
This story was originally published April 8, 2022 at 7:28 AM with the headline "Large shark hooked off Australia gets devoured by bigger shark as its being reeled in."