For years, researchers studying marine life in the wild would occasionally come across animals—such as dolphins, swordfish, leatherback sea turtles, whales, white sharks and even humans—with oddly shaped plugs of tissue taken out of their bodies. Those fresh bites and scars were almost like someone took a cookie cutter and surgically removed a hunk of tissue. These bites were not only restricted to animals, as submarines in the 1970s and 1980s were having their rubber-coated sonar sensors bitten in this same fashion and underwater electrical cables were also found to have the odd-shaped bites.