A bigger boat might help you defeat Jaws, but we’re not sure there’s a schooner big enough to save us from the mammoth-sized grouper that gobbled up a shark right in front of two astonished Florida fishermen earlier this month.
Coming to us via Digg, this YouTube video shows one medium-sized blacktip reef shark having a very, very bad day. After having been snared on the hook of a fishing boat off the coast of Bonita Springs, Fla., the poor shark is being reeled in when the grouper surfaces and takes it down in one bite.
The accurately named Atlantic Goliath Grouper can grow up to 10 feet long. With the row of spines on its back and a cavernous mouth full of numerous rows of razor-sharp teeth, the creature resembles a leviathan emerging from the deep.
The rare grouper sighting comes less than a month after another Atlantic grouper nearly chomped a diver’s foot in an underwater encounter.
Don’t let the creatures terrify you into staying out of the water, though—the Goliath Grouper is an endangered species. While it’s struggled to make a comeback in its native North American waters, the population is rebounding slowly but surely—not to mention hungrily.
Hopefully, that means we can look forward to more ridiculously scary encounters with the fish to come.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY SA 3.0
