There's something striking fear into the hearts of great white sharks off the coast of South Africa: two killer whales with an appetite for their livers. As the Washington Post reports, a pair of male orcas known as "Port" and "Starboard" are terrorizing shark populations in the region by killing them with surgical precision and eating their livers. "They can handle a white shark and just shuck it like a mussel almost—just tear it open and slide its liver out and consume it and discard the rest," says marine biologist Alison Towner from Rhodes University in South Africa.
The pair were first spotted in 2012 near the Cape of Good Hope and then reappeared three years later after shark carcasses were discovered in the area. Although the sharks had massive wounds to their underbellies, only their livers were removed while their hearts, stomachs, and other major organs were left intact. During subsequent years, scientists determined that Port and Starboard were the killers based on sightings that synced with attacks on sharks. Shark livers, which can make up a third of a shark's body weight, are very high in fatty lipids that provide energy, Tamlyn Engelbrecht wrote in a 2019 research paper titled "Running Scared: When Predators Become Prey."
Although killer whales eat a wide range of food, from fish to seals, it's typically rare to see them attack large sharks at the top of the food chain. Alison Kock, a marine scientist with South African National Parks, says that the discovery that orcas—which can grow up to 32 feet and weigh in at 11 tons—can easily take down a great white goes against Hollywood's depiction of orcas, like the one in the 1993 family movie Free Willy. "Seeing their immense impact on white sharks and how they prey on them, and how Hannibal Lecter it is, I think that Free Willy really was a bit of a lie and Silence of the Lambs was a little bit more accurate," says Kock. (More orca stories.)
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