Turducken of the Sea? Incredible Photo Shows Shark Eating Shark

It's a dog-eat-dog world on land. But in the sea, it's more like shark-eat-shark.

As a rule of thumb (or fin) in the ocean, the big fish eat the little ones. But such a fact of ocean life is usually not demonstrated as powerfully as it is in this photo taken by the University of Delaware's Ocean Exploration, Remote Sensing, Biogeography (ORB) Lab.

The ORB Lab posted the photo to its Facebook account on July 21 and the image, for obvious reasons, has gained a huge amount of attention.

What you're seeing is a three-foot-long dogfish being eating by a sand tiger shark.

The ORB Lab team snapped the photo on July 19 while on an expedition to recapture sharks carrying electronic data tags as part of the lab's research on sand tiger sharks.

"We caught one large female on our first line Friday, but we were not expecting to catch her like this! This unlucky smooth dogfish couldn't resist the menhaden used as bait and unfortunately fell victim to one of the top predators in the bay," the ORB Lab wrote on the Facebook post that accompanied the photo.

The dogfish did not survive the encounter, but the sand tiger shark was released after it was given a small identification tag.

Online commentators have called the image "the turducken of the sea" as well as suggested possible titles for the image, including "Sharkception" and "Sharknado 2."

Sand tiger sharks are also sometimes known as raggedtooth sharks. But the shark's mangled teeth give it the impression of being more vicious than it really is, the ORB Lab said. Sand tiger sharks lose about one tooth per day while eating boney fish, rays, squid, lobsters, crabs, and, of course, smaller sharks. Sand tiger sharks have about 56 rows of teeth in each jaw, when one tooth falls out, another shifts forwards to replace it.

Smooth dogfish are a type of shark commonly found in bays and other shallow inshore waters. They can grow as long as 60 inches.