Sharks use all its senses available to hunt down prey

A new study has revealed that when a shark gets hungry, it will use all the senses it has available to hunt down something to eat.

The goal of the study was to figure out how sharks use their different senses together, rather than isolating one sense at a time, Discovery News reported.

Researchers examined three species of sharks - blacktip, bonnethead and nurse sharks - in an artificial flow channel inside the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.

Jayne Gardiner, a postdoctoral fellow at Mote, who led the study, said that the biggest motivation with this multisensory approach was to try to understand what they're really doing in a natural environment with sensory cues.

She added that researchers have been wanting to do this kind of work for decades, but the sheer amount of data, the size of the facility and the cost required to do this were challenges.

The findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.