About three feet long and pale, with a face like a shovel, the bonnethead shark cruises lush seagrass meadows off both coasts of North America, snacking on shrimp, small crabs, and fish. In 2007, researchers took a close look at the diets of bonnetheads in the Gulf of Mexico by examining their stomach contents. They expected to find the typical carnivorous diet of a small shark, but instead found that almost half the material in their stomachs was seagrass.
Were the sharks accidentally snarfing the marine plants as they hunted, or were they getting something out of the grazing?Samantha Leigh, a doctoral candidate at the University of…
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