Accidents in marine biology still yield data
(vore, digestion, disposal)
It was a lot of effort but in the end the team had managed to attach both sensors to the porbeagle’s body and released the pregnant shark back into the ocean. She was a little over two meters long, very stocky, mostly because of the four pups in her and after a clean procedure, she was virtually unharmed when freed. A satellite tag on her dorsal fin would ping her location whenever her fin broke through the surface while a pop off tag dangling behind her like a little buoy was tracking the pressure and temperature of her surroundings. This way the team of marine biologists would be able to follow her around and eventually, after some months on her back, the pop off tag would detach and -once found- deliver valuable information on where she went,how deep she dove and how fast she accelerated. This was all meant to be used to figure out where these shark go at what time of day, where and what they might hunt for food and even where they give birth.
However the pop off tag surfaced weeks early and once the suspiciously bleached machine had been relieved of its recordings, it took the researchers mere moments to piece together where their test subject had ended up.
 
 
A couple of weeks before the tag surfaced
 
She was amazed the humans had let her go again. It had been a horrible struggle against their neigh invisible trap. Once she was tired out they had dragged her out of the water and cut into her dorsal fin and the thick skin right behind it on her back. The pain had been bad but the terror almost crushed her. It felt like a miracle when she had been pushed back into the sea and found herself almost unharmed. After a few minutes she was convinced that the pain was subsiding quickly, healing faster than most bite wounds she was familiar with and that her only issue was some strange tugging sensation on her back. Occasionally something light but firm also bumped into her tail. But it was not too much of an issue and she was happy to simply be alive still. Maybe a nice meal would fix things.
 
She spent the following days foraging, mostly at great depths, especially during the day. This was an ancient and quite effective method to get out of the way of most of the few things which might find her a tasty meal allow her to hunt in the pitch darkness 600m down, using her supreme senses of smell and vibration. Whenever she came across a congregation of small squid which were in turn hunted by larger deep sea fish, she conveniently topped off the local food chain there. Usually a belly full of that would be just fine for her, but with her pups devouring sheer endless amounts of unfertilized eggs she kept producing for their consumption, she needed more still.
During nighttime, she ascended to lower depths, where the combination of her large, sensitive eyes and even the dimmest star light was sufficient to let her hunt. Various pelagic fish and one particularly drowsy young blue shark learned far more about her hunting methods than they would have liked, but to her they were all just fuel for her migration and the pretty large pups growing in her belly, one pair of hungry jaws in each uterus. However her hunts had not gone as easily or as quickly as she was used to. From previous pregnancies she knew things were worse than they should be. At higher speeds the thing on her back tugged on her ever harder and held her back. Less drowsy blue sharks and mackerel used this to escape her ravenous hunger. But when she felt something stir behind her, she realised the added drag she suffered from had a more pronounced disadvantage yet. The frequency of the motion she sensed in her sideline organ was too low and approaching too fast and too accurately to be anything other than trouble. She swam in a zig zag pattern, allowing one of her eyes after the other to peer back, seeking to disprove her suspicion. But sure enough a pair of fairly similar eyes as hers peered back at her. Just as dark, but a lot bigger and attached to a matching predator. In a very indirect way they were cousins, she and the white shark approaching her. But in a more relevant connection, she was very much on his menu.
 
She burst into a mad sprint, trying to escape the great white. She knew from previous encounters that these bigger sharks had more stamina and a scary top speed. And since this one had a pair of hefty claspers dangling under his tail as he gave chase, he certainly was not slowed down by unborn offspring. Her only chance was what saved her skin the last three times she had run into such a predator. She had to make herself a very inconvenient target and so far speed and agility had been the tools of choice for that. She swam as fast as she could but never reached the part where she would start swimming circles around her more cumbersome predator. Instead the tugging sensation behind her dorsal fin turned into a profound drag at the top of her noticeably impaired speed. When she wanted to check how far away her pursuer was and angled her head to the left a bit more to train an eye on him, she already saw his gaping maw loom over her madly flicking tail. When the glistening triangular teeth came down, she could not believe it at first. There was no pain at this stage either, but she heard the serrated edges effortlessly slicing through her tough skin with a jarring sound. Then the great white gulped immediately. Now her whole body was getting pulled back, blood flowed from her nasty wounds and once more the jaws game down, this time sinking into her back and belly. From there it was all a blur. She was being pulled in quickly and the undulating flesh of her predator hugged the electroreceptors on her snout so tightly it overwhelmed her senses and dazed her. She only noticed that her fins were all folded tightly to her body, utter darkness and a gentle pressure engulfed her head as she was dragged deeper, into her predator’s stomach.
Once her wounded soon to be carcass came to a stop against the gently undulating, acid drooling walls of the stomach about to dissolve her, things became a lot more vivid though. Just like her own stomach, that of her fellow lamnid shark was engulfed in something called rete miraculum, a clever array of blood vessels which allowed the shark to use the heat generated by his swimming muscles to speed power up said muscles and to speed up digestion. The porbeagle had enjoyed this in the shape of melting squid and small fish in mere hours but now she was on the receiving side of things and learned that it worked just the same on 150kg of solid, pregnant porbeagle shark as well. Her lower tail and caudal fin were pulled into the lower section of her predator’s J-shaped stomach, where churning and acid secretion were particularly violent, still, what really ended her daze was when sticky digestive enzymes and fresh hydrochloric acid drooled from the slimy stomach walls and oozed right into her gills. It was a sudden contest between the chemical reactions on top of her taste buds and electroreceptors which tried to stun her and the ones on her eyes and gills which caused her burning hot agony. The struggle was close, but the pain side won and she remained conscious for the five ish minutes it took her to suffocate in there. However this was long enough for the vile liquids to soak her frail gill filaments and cause them to shrivel into a red brown soggy mush since the delicate structures optimised for osmotic exchange proved to be exceedingly easy to digest. To a lesser degree her nostrils and eyes were tormented in much the same way once the churning stomach walls were slathering digestive fluids all over her body and seemed to massage them into her deep bite wounds with uncanny aptitude. It was only her exhaustion from the short but intense flight which allowed her to pass out eventually before literally digesting to death, but the damage inflicted on her on the way to oblivion got worse by the second. She tried to kick out, to struggle, but the soft stomach walls only gave way so much before the enormous swimming muscles beyond them caused the slimy walls to push back and simply mixed her with the flesh melting fluids like any other food. Just as her eyes turned a distinctly blind murky white, she shuddered a last time and came to a stop. The last thing she felt before all went numb and black was the little pups in her belly still squirming as if they knew what was up. They would be born by her body dissolving away from around them and then they will follow her through her predator’s well filled and spoiled digestive tract.
 
 
Gash was gliding through the water quite happily. He had swallowed that porbeagle three days ago, whole and alive and quite easily too at that. He had been feeding on that species on and off for many years, whenever an opportunity came, but he had been surprised how easily this one had been to outpace. Maybe she had been ill or too stuffed with her own meal, given how girthy she had been. Either way, she was just a thin liquid mass gently flowing through the corkscrew shaped channel of his spiral valve, giving off her large collection of valuable nutrients on the way. As his liver swelled with fresh oils, his blood and muscles stacked with nutrients, the porbeagle and the four unborn pups he did not even know about slowly got reduced to white shark waste. The only thing in all of this that gave Gash any real trouble was an occasional pain in his body. He recalled something similar when he had ingested a whole turtle once and pieces of its shell survived his stomach, but that never happened with any shark he had consumed before. And he has eaten a lot of sharks in his almost forty years of roaming the ocean.
On occasion the pressure like discomfort amounted to genuine pain. The fact that it was cozy compared to what he had put his food through, was neither consolation nor on his mind in the first place. As someone who had digested tens of thousands of smaller beings to become what he was, spending a single thought on the demise of his mere food would drive him to madness. Instead he was just looking forwards to getting rid of the temporary blockage which at least moved along his guts reliably enough.
 
Another day later, enough former porbeagles have piled up at the far end of Gash’s digestive tract to warrant excretion. The shark would sigh if he could as he was about to part with the thing that had caused him no shortage of belly aches in the past half week. With a last painful pop it spilled from his spread cloaca and erupted from his rear, directly between his hefty claspers and engulfed in a plume of warm, brown muck which had once been a fierce predator and her offspring. Usually he paid no mind to the quickly dissipating remnants of his prey, but this time Gash made an exception and turned around. He was beyond confused when he found one boxy looking thing fall towards the black abyss of the sea while another, oval shaped, bleached grey object slowly rose to the surface. He poked it with his snout and took it in his maw, concluding it definitely was not something that should usually be inside a shark, be it digestor or digestee. Confused and hungry he turned around, looking for any signs of a good opportunity to enforce his spot on the pinnacle of the food chain.
 
 
“...and while the temperature recorded for three days by the tracking devise also fit a shortfin mako, the depth profile recorded by the ingested device points at the only remaining culprit, a great white shark. While this one was the most sensational, her three equally pregnant ‘colleagues’ are still moving on their own and transmitting data periodically. Their pop off tags should surface in more or less two weeks. Then we might find out where porbeagles are born, which would be a considerable step forwards in their urgently needed conservation.” concluded the professor. The amazed gasps of his masters students were always a reminder why it was so rewarding to pursue teaching science, but the professor could not shake the gnawing thought that the tagged shark and her pups would be alive and well instead of mere sediment now, if they had taken more care to make the tracking devices more wearer friendly. But doing so would delay any progress on the tracking program beyond his life span, given how sparse funding was for anything that was not in some way related to selling more phones or waging wars. In the end he had to tell himself it was a sacrifice worth making and moved on.