For decades, the waters off Cape Town were the single best place on Earth to see great white sharks. Then two orcas with collapsed dorsal fins showed up, figured out how to surgically remove shark livers, and apparently told their friends. The sharks are gone now. Every last one of them.
The Greatest Predator on Earth Got Absolutely Cooked
CBS News and 60 Minutes have been tracking this story since April, and the basic facts are still jaw-dropping every time you read them. The coastal waters around Cape Town, South Africa used to host 250 to 300 individual great white sharks per year, spotted regularly by naturalist and photographer Chris Fallows. Cage diving was a booming tourist industry. Anderson Cooper dove in chummed water in 2010 and nearly had a heart attack when a 15-foot great white swam directly at his face.
That industry is dead. The tourists stopped coming. If you went out to those same waters today, Fallows told CBS News, you would see nothing. Not a fin. Not a shadow. The great white sharks of Cape Town are, for all practical purposes, gone.
It Started With Bodies and Missing Livers
Around 2015, things got weird. Smaller shark carcasses started turning up on the sea floor with what looked like surgical incisions. Marine biologist Alison Kock, who works with South African National Parks, told CBS News that the cuts looked so precise she initially assumed a human with a knife was responsible. A fisherman, maybe.
Then she retrieved the carcasses. There were tooth marks on the pectoral fins. Not human. Something else had done this.
Two years later, great white sharks themselves started washing ashore, their livers missing. The liver, Kock explained, is the most calorie-dense organ in the shark's body and takes up nearly a third of its total mass. Whatever was doing this wasn't trying to eat the whole shark. It was going straight for the good stuff, cracking the animal open and taking exactly what it came for, leaving the rest.
Enter Port and Starboard
Kock and her team eventually gathered enough evidence to name the culprits: orcas. Killer whales had been in these waters for years without anyone observing them hunt great whites here. That changed when whale-watching tour operator David Hurwitz spotted two very distinctive male orcas running a two-shark operation in South African waters.
Both animals had collapsed dorsal fins, one folded left, one right. Hurwitz, being a nautical man, named them Port and Starboard. According to CBS News, that name caught on fast. Port and Starboard are now, in Hurwitz's words, world famous. Or infamous, depending on your feelings about sharks.
What made them unusual is that most orcas hunt in groups. Port and Starboard were doing this as a pair, developing techniques no one had documented in South African waters before. Kock described it as completely novel for the region. The working theory is that they essentially invented a local hunting strategy from scratch.
Then They Taught Everyone Else
Here is where it goes from weird nature story to something that should make you slightly uneasy about the ocean. Scientists now believe Port and Starboard may have been passing their techniques along. In 2022, drone footage captured five orcas working together to stun and then kill a great white shark. That is not Port and Starboard hunting alone anymore. That is a learned behavior spreading through a population.
Kock told CBS News she spent years trying to piece together the full picture, and for a long time, people struggled to believe orcas were doing this at all. The cultural assumption was firm: great whites are apex predators. Nothing hunts them. Except, it turns out, orcas absolutely do, and once two of them figured out a reliable method, it rippled outward.
The sharks noticed. Whatever internal threat-assessment system great white sharks have apparently registered "this place is dangerous now" and the population simply left or collapsed. Scientists are still debating the exact mechanism, CBS News reports, and there is a genuine feud among researchers about how much of the decline comes from orca predation versus other factors like overfishing and habitat pressure. But the sharks are gone, and Port and Starboard were there first.
The Part Where Scientists Start Yelling at Each Other
The orca theory is compelling and well-supported, but CBS News is careful to note that this is not a settled science situation. There is an active, bitter dispute among researchers and conservationists about what actually drove the great whites out of Cape Town's waters. Some researchers believe the orca predation is the dominant cause. Others think it is one factor among several, and that pinning everything on Port and Starboard lets humans off the hook for broader ecological damage to the region.
That argument matters. If orcas are the primary driver, then what happened in Cape Town is a tragic but natural reshuffling of a predator hierarchy, one that humans cannot and probably should not interfere with. If human activity created the conditions that weakened the shark population first, then the orca predation was the final push on a door that was already open. The policy implications of those two interpretations are very different.
The Dingo Take
Look, we write about governments failing and institutions rotting and powerful people getting away with things they absolutely should not get away with, and somehow the story that has genuinely kept us up at night this week is two orcas with floppy dorsal fins quietly dismantling an apex predator population and teaching the next generation how to do it. Port and Starboard are out there right now. Living their best lives. Completely unbothered.
The thing that is actually worth sitting with here is not just the spectacle of it, which is considerable. It is what the disappearance of great whites from Cape Town represents. That was one of the last truly wild, awe-inspiring marine encounters available to regular humans. You could pay a modest amount of money, get in a cage, and be face to face with a 15-foot apex predator. That is gone now. The tourists stopped coming. The industry collapsed. Whatever combination of orca predation, overfishing, and general human degradation of the ocean caused this, the result is the same: the world got smaller and duller and less terrifying in exactly the wrong way.
The scientists are still fighting about who is really to blame, which is fine, that is what scientists are supposed to do. But somewhere in the waters off Cape Town, a pod of orcas that learned a trick from two charismatic weirdos named Port and Starboard is circling around, looking for the next thing to crack open. And the great whites are just gone. The apex predator of a hundred years of human nightmares got outcompeted by something smarter and meaner and more adaptable. If that does not make you think about a few things beyond marine biology, you are not paying attention.
