Giant tiger sharks eat backyard birds, surprising study reveals
This is the first scientific confirmation that the voracious predators regularly eat land-based birds.
Now, new research suggests that baby tiger sharks have an even weirder item on their menu: common backyard birds.
Study leader Marcus Drymon stumbled upon the discovery in 2010, when he caught a small tiger shark as part of an ongoing research project in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We brought it onto the boat to get ready to measure it, weigh it, tag it, and release it, and it barfed up this big [mass] of feathers,” says Drymon, a marine fisheries researcher at Mississippi State University.
“Being a scientist, of course, I scooped them all up and took them back to the lab to analyze.” (Read about what it's like to go face-to-face with a tiger shark.)
It turned out the
