South Africa: The Strongest Bite Alive
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Cape Argus (Cape Town)
8 August 2008
Posted to the web 5 August 2008
John Yeld
If you're unlucky enough to be chomped by a great white shark - and you have a much greater chance of being electrocuted by your toaster or being killed in a dog attack - you'll be subjected to a very impressive mechanical force.
But you may still count yourself lucky that you weren't living between 1.5 million and 18 million years ago, and that the creature doing the biting wasn't "Big Tooth", the gigantic fossil shark Carcharodon megalodon.
Believed to have been the most fearsome predator ever to have lived on Earth, this creature's bite was up to 10 times more powerful than that of its still impressive modern cousin, the modern great white, and also way more than Tyrannosaurus rex, often considered to be the apex scary predator.
Shark researchers from the University of New South Wales, Newcastle University and the NSW Department of Primary Industries Fisheries, all in Australia, and the University of California in the US, have just published research in the latest edition of the Journal of Zoology detailing some of the extraordinary forces in the bite of these top ocean predators.
Using sophisticated computer modelling techniques, they have uncovered unprecedented information about the feeding habits of the two shark carnivores by analysing anatomical and bio-mechanical data from their skull and muscle tissues.
Through multiple x-ray images generated by a computerised tomography (CT) scanner, they generated three-dimensional models of the skull of a 2.4m male great white shark, according to a summary of their research published on the EurekAlert! science news website.
Using novel imaging and analysis software and a technique known as "finite element analysis", the team reconstructed the Great White's skull, jaws and muscles, remodelling them as hundreds of thousands of tiny discrete, but connected, parts.
They then digitally "crash- tested" this computer model to simulate different scenarios and reveal the shark's powerful bite, as well as the complex distributions of stresses and strains that these forces impose on the shark's jaws.
They calculated that the largest living great whites have a bite force of up to 1.8 metric tons - way stronger than that of a lion at around 560kg of bite force, and making a human's 80kg snap look like a powder puff.
Steve Wroe, the study's lead author from the University of New South Wales, said the great white shark was without a doubt one of the hardest biting creatures alive - possibly the hardest.
"Nature has endowed this carnivore with more than enough bite force to kill and eat large and potentially dangerous prey," he said.
"Pound for pound, the shark's bite is not particularly impressive, but the sheer size of this animal means that, in absolute terms, it tops the scales.
"It must also be remembered that its extremely sharp serrated teeth require relatively little force to drive them through thick skin, fat and muscle."
Relevant Links
According to Wroe and colleagues, fossil evidence suggests that Big Tooth was an active predator of large whales and immobilised these huge prey species by biting off their tails and flippers, before feeding on them at their leisure.
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