Click on the photo to watch the video on ScienceMag.org
If you’ve done any kind of construction, you know what a Sawzall is. Reciprocating saws are an all-around tool with a blade that moves back and forth, which as it turns out, is pretty similar to how a shark’s teeth move.
Recently a Cornell University student decided they’d experiment with the viciousness of different shark bites. For years, the power of a shark’s bite has been studied, but sharks often whip their heads back and forth with eating, using their serrated teeth to rip the flesh of their prey into smaller, more manageable pieces. The student, along with a few others, attached four to 10 teeth from different kinds of sharks onto a reciprocating saw blade, then videotaped what happened when they cut through a salmon. The teeth they used were from a tiger shark, a sixgill shark, a silky shark, and a sandbar shark.
After the tests, the students came back with their results, reporting them at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. According to the students, the tiger shark’s teeth were the most deadly, cutting through the spine of the salmon in six cuts. The sixgill’s teeth, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well–after 12 cuts, only 7% of the salmon’s tissue was cut, and the teeth dulled very quickly.
All this makes sense, though. Tiger sharks feed on things like turtles, as well as prey with softer body. Sixgills feed mainly on carrion.
