Oophagy
practice of embryos feeding on eggs produced by the ovary while still inside the mother's uterus
Oophagy ( oh-OFF-ə-jee) or ovophagy, literally "egg eating", is the practice of
embryos feeding on eggs produced by the ovary while still inside the mother's uterus. The word oophagy is formed from the classical Greek ᾠόν (ōion, "egg") and classical Greek φᾱγεῖν (phāgein, "to eat"). In contrast, adelphophagy is the cannibalism of a multi-celled embryo.
Oophagy is thought to occur in all sharks in the order Lamniformes and has been recorded in the bigeye thresher (Alopias superciliosus), the pelagic thresher (A. pelagicus), the shortfin mako (Isurus oxyrinchus) and the porbeagle (Lamna nasus) among others. It also occurs in the tawny nurse shark (Nebrius ferrugineus), and in the family Pseudotriakidae.
This practice may lead to larger embryos or prepare the embryo for a predatory lifestyle.
There are variations in the extent of oophagy among the different shark species. The grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus) practices intrauterine cannibalism, the first developed embryo consuming both additional eggs and any other developing embryos. Slender smooth-hounds (Gollum attenuatus), form egg capsules which contain 30-80 ova, within which only one ovum develops; the remaining ova are ingested and their yolks stored in its external yolk sac. The embryo then proceeds to develop normally, without ingesting further eggs.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oophagy” as practice of embryos feeding on eggs produced by the ovary while still inside the mother's uterus. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1421015. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oophagy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.