Sharks and red snappers

Gray reef sharks and red snappers hover above a patch of table coral at Kingman Reef, Pacific Ocean, waiting for prey fish to emerge.   Photograph Brian Skerry

“They go after everything that moves,” observed Enric Sala, a marine ecologist. Because of their abundance and the resulting competition for food, the sharks and snappers at Kingman Reef, Sala said, “are always on the verge of hunger.”

Kingman Reef is part of a chain of Pacific atolls and islands (called the Line Islands) that straddles the Equator south of Hawaii.