Sharks as exfoliators: widespread chafing between marine organisms suggests and unexplored ecological role

This dataset is associated to the article “Sharks as exfoliators: widespread chafing between marine organisms suggests and unexplored ecological role” by Williams et al. (2021), to be published in Ecology's The Scientific Naturalist. Specifically, these are the video and jpeg files used to generate Table 1 in the Appendix and Figures 1 and 3 as well as the metadata master table which includes all documented chafing incidents and the file names for the associated video or photograph. These data are the results of collating 47 video, photographic and anecdotal observations from thirteen different locations across the world's oceans. This appears to be the only phenomenon whereby a prey actively seeks out and rubs up against a predator. Of the 47 recorded incidents, 25 were recorded using a drone; six incidents were recorded subsurface by divers; five were documented photographically; the rest were anecdotal observations. Given the logistical difficulties in observing sharks in the wild, the prevalence of reports of chafing involving multiple species in multiple locations around the world raises several ecological questions. We hypothesize several ecological implications and suggest future research to better understand this phenomenon.

We conducted research in accordance with research permits no. CN32-31-7168 and RES2019/24, issued by CapeNature and the South African Department of Environmental Affairs, respectively. Drone data from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa was collected during the 2019 field season of the first author’s ongoing Masters thesis, which is funded by the Isermann Family Foundation, Give Back Brands Foundation, and the Shark Research and Conservation (SRC) lab at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Authors LHW and AA wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to data collection, analysis and manuscript revisions.