60% of the bonnethead shark’s diet is made up of seagrass, which they happily graze upon as well as eating fish, crabs, snails and shrimp 
 
 It is one of the most radical rebrandings in history: contrary to their bloodthirsty image, some sharks are not irrepressible meat eaters, but are happy to munch on vegetation too. 
 
 According to US researchers, one of the most common sharks in the world, a relative of the hammerhead which patrols the shores of the Americas, is the first variety of shark to be outed as a bona fide omnivore. 
 
 The bonnethead shark is abundant in the shallow waters of the eastern Pacific, the Western Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, where they feed on crab, shrimp, snails and bony fish. Though small by shark standards, adult females – the larger of the sexes – can still reach an impressive five feet long. 
 
 Scientists at the University of California in Irvine, and Florida International University in Miami, decided to investigate the sharks’ dietary habits after reading reports of the fish chomping on seagrass, the flowering marine plant that forms subsea meadows in some coastal waters. 
 
 “It has been assumed by most that this consumption was incidental and that it provided no nutritional value,” said Samantha Leigh, a researcher on the team. “I wanted to see how much of this seagrass diet the sharks could digest, because what an animal consumes is not necessarily the same as what it digests and retains nutrients from.” 
 
 To see whether the sharks are truly flexitarian, the scientists retrieved sea grass from Florida Bay and hauled it back to the lab where they re-planted it. As the seagrass took root, the researchers added sodium bicarbonate powder made with a specific carbon isotope to the water. This was taken up by the seagrass, giving it a distinctive chemical signature. 
 
 The researchers next caught five bonnethead sharks and brought them back to the lab. Once the fish had settled in, they were fed on a three week diet of the seagrass and squid. All of the fish put on weight over the course of the study. 
 
 The scientists then ran a series of tests on the sharks. These showed that the fish successfully digested the seagrass with enzymes that broke down components of the plants, such as starch and cellulose. Lacking the kind of teeth best suited for mastication, the fish may rely on strong stomach acids to weaken the plants’ cells so the enzymes can have their digestive effects. In all, more than half of the organic material locked up in the seagrass was digested by the sharks, putting them on a par with young green sea turtles. 
 
 Further tests found high levels of the seagrass carbon isotope in the sharks’ blood and liver tissue, demonstrating that the digested food was being used to build and maintain the animals. The results led the scientists to their inevitable conclusion: “The bonnethead shark is the first known omnivorous species of shark,” said Leigh. 
 
 The findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, overturn the idea that all sharks are exclusive meat-eaters, but that is not all. “This has implications for fragile and crucial seagrass meadow habitat management,” said Leigh. From now on, researchers who look after such habitats will have to factor in that bonnetheads not only eat the plants, but can make seagrass as much as 60% of their diet. 
 
 The revelation has raised questions about how well scientists understand the feeding habits of other species, on land as well as at sea. “We should be taking a closer look at what animals are consuming, digesting, and excreting in their environments around the world, because it impacts habitats that we depend on as well,” Leigh added. 
 
 At the moment, there are few suspicions that other shark species have broadened their diets to consume plants as well as meat. That would call for an even more drastic rewriting of the textbooks. “If other species are taking omnivorous digestive strategies as well, then we’d need to re­evaluate their role as top predators,” said Leigh. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| It's not exactly as vegetarian as Finding Nemo's Bruce, but this grass-eating shark could come close to taking the "fish are friends, not food" pledge. 
 
 Researchers claim they've identified the world's first known omnivorous shark, which eats both underwater animals and plants. 
 
 In a new study published by researchers at the University of California-Irvine and Florida International University, the bonnethead shark, which dwells in seagrass meadows off the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts, was found to be not solely carnivorous, as previously thought — it's been sighted having a good nom on that seagrass on multiple occasions. 
 
 Although co-authors Samantha Leigh, Yannis Papastamatiou, and Donovan German presented their findings on the shark's unusual seagrass-eating habits at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology's annual meeting in January, the newly published study states that this is the "first species of shark ever to be shown to have an omnivorous digestive strategy," the authors wrote. 
 
 Scientists have long known that bonnethead sharks have snacked on seagrass, they just weren't quite sure whether it passed through their digestive system unabsorbed, gobbled up as a side effect of grazing for other fish. Now, knowing the sharks do absorb nutrients from the seagrass, the researchers have concluded that the sharks are, in fact, omnivorous. 
 
 The study, titled "Seagrass digestion by a notorious 'carnivore,'" was published in August in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 
 
 Through digestive system analysis (yeah, not pretty research), the sharks' guts were found to contain up to 60 percent plant matter, with a few crustaceans and mollusks in the mix. 
 
 The researchers also found special enzymes that allow the shark to digest the seagrass effectively; according to the study, bonnethead sharks are actually better at digesting plant material than pandas. Take that, pandas. 
 
 So, why should you care about a grass-loving shark? According to the study, the effect of omnivores on the stability of an ecosystem has been debated by researchers, with these particular researchers suggesting that omnivorous predators in marine systems have the capacity to significantly impact the surrounding food chain. 
 
 In this case, the ecosystem in question is the seagrass meadows which the bonnetheads enjoy, alongside thousands of species of fish. The sheer numbers of the sharks (approximately 4.9 million individuals) means their impact is significant. 
 
 "Understanding how the consumption and digestion habits of bonnethead sharks impacts seagrass ecosystems is important as these omnivores may stabilize food web dynamics and even play a role in nutrient redistribution and transport," the study reads. 
 
 "This is critical to effectively formulating conservation efforts." 
 
 The full impact is still yet to be analyzed, but this research is a good start. Plus, I bet you're looking at sharks differently now, not as mindless, meat-eating machines.
– Jaws would've been a lot less scary had Steven Spielberg replaced his great white villain with a bonnethead shark. It's "the first known omnivorous species of shark," says researcher Samantha Leigh, co-author of a new study that describes the hammerhead relative as a lover of seagrass. Indeed, up to 60% of the bonnethead shark's diet is seagrass found in coastal waters around the Americas, with the rest made up of bony fish, crabs, snails, and shrimp, reports the Guardian. Researchers were previously aware of bonnethead sharks munching on the marine plant but "it has been assumed by most that this consumption was incidental and that it provided no nutritional value," says Leigh. Through a series of tests, scientists proved that wasn't the case. They captured five bonnetheads, which can reach up to five feet long, and put them on a three-week diet of squid as well as seagrass the researchers had given a distinctive chemical signature. Using enzymes to break down starch and cellulose—strong stomach acids might also be at play—the sharks digested more than half of the organic material in the grass, meaning they were better at digesting plant material than pandas, per Mashable, or "on a par with young green sea turtles," per the Guardian. A carbon isotope added to the seagrass was also found in the sharks' blood and liver tissue, indicating the plant does serve a nutritional purpose for the sharks. The "ecological implications" of 4.9 million bonnethead sharks munching on seagrass are not yet fully understood. (There was once a shark twice the size of a great white.)