On Friday we told you all about the recent spate of great white sharks washing up dead along the coast near Gansbaai.

Those were eventually confirmed as orca attacks (HERE), and if you thought that was the end of it you’d be wrong.

Sunday saw another great white washing ashore, this time in Struisbaai, and it has also been confirmed as an orca attack.

Below from Traveller24:

[Alison Towner, biologist at the Dyer Island Conservation Trust] says that the third carcass – a 4.2m male white shark – is also missing its entire liver, which is an injury matching the previous two dead specimens.

“We have never seen anything like this. This is a very sad time for us all, nature can be so cruel and the dexterity these enormous animals [orcas] are capable of is mind blowing – almost surgical precision as they remove the squalene rich liver of the white sharks and dump their carcass,” says Towner.

“Surgical precision” – shucks, you have to give the orca props for that.

Here’s the third shark from Sunday, with pictures via Marine Dynamics:

If you’re thinking that all these dead sharks must be bad for business then hey, you’re onto something:

Marine Dynamics operates in Kleinbaai, a small harbour town, part of Gansbaai in the Western Cape of South Africa – better known as a hotspot for the Great White Shark and one of the best places in the world to see and dive with these iconic creatures in their natural environment.

“This is a difficult yet fascinating time. Something rarely documented in marine top predator behaviour in South Africa,” says Towner. The White Shark Research Group is currently compiling a comprehensive report on the dissection and it will be released as soon as possible.

Again from the Marine Dynamics Facebook post:

Our commercial diving vessel, Slashfin, tried Dyer Island and came back without a single shark sighting today.

Tough times for shark cage diving operators.

Another picture from yesterday’s post-mortem:

Nature can be brutal, and when you’re seeing sharks over four metres in length (one of last week’s sharks weighed in excess of a tonne) being picked off then you know that the sea isn’t for the faint of heart.

[sources:traveller24&facebook]