Great white sharks bite chunks out of each other in frenzied attack

Two great white sharks were caught biting huge chunks out of each other.

An incredible National Geographic show, Cannibal Sharks, captured the moment when the two sharks got into a frenzied fight - which ended in more than a few battle wounds.

The show, which first aired in 2019, investigated increasing reports of the predators preying on their own kind.

But while the footage is incredibly rare, professor Mark Meekan, from the Australian Institute for Marine Science, warned people that this wasn’t a one-off attack.

Professor Meekan said: "It's not just one rogue shark attacking other sharks or even one species of shark attacking other sharks, it's lots of different sharks turning on each other."

Another spine-chilling image showed a 12-foot corpse of a great white that had almost been sliced in half by one of its own, removing the majority of the middle of its body.

The two great white sharks really went for it. (SWNS)

The sad reality is that more and more of these carcasses are being retrieved from the ocean around the Gold Coast of Australia - with some being so badly wounded that their head is all that remains.

And Professor Meekan has come up with a possible explanation for why the sharks might be doing this to each other - and it might be to do with keeping hungry predators away from swimmers.

In line with The Gold Coast's safety measures, nets and bated hook lines are deployed, however, trapped sharks send out distress signals which are then picked up by other sharks that won't turn down a free meal.

Examining a photograph of the shark with two huge bites taken out of its centre, Professor Meekan said: "This is an enormous shark.

“It's 12-feet long but look at the size of that bite, it's absolutely massive."

One of the sharks had two enormous bite marks. (SWNS)

He continued to say: ''That's an immense amount of power you need to take a bite out of another shark like that - you have to be pretty big yourself.

''If I was a betting man, I might even pick another great white shark for that one.

“These things are apex predators for good reason."

And new research shows that this is not a new phenomena - as sharks have been eating each other for over a million years.

Fossilised poo was taken from a shark that swam the oceans 300 millions years ago, called an orthacanthus, and was found to have contained baby shark teeth.

Professor Meekan said: "That shows that 300m years ago these were cannibal sharks.

“Shark on shark predation is a fundamental trait."