Can a dolphin eat a shark?

Following up on the general fascination with dolphins brutalizing sharks, I would like to take a minute and answer a question addressed to me by one of my readers.

Can a dolphin eat a shark?

The answer is yes and no. First of all, dolphins are carnivorous mammals so they eat meat. They persist solely on eating fish. They will eat shark if sharks are fed to them in small quantities. In fact, they will probably eat any other meat if it is "served" right.

At the same time, dolphins do not attack sharks with the aim to eat those. They eat relatively small fish which they can take in at once. They do not have the capacity to tear off chunks of meat from a large animal. So in reality, a dolphin cannot eat a shark, unless the shark is a very small baby shark. Even so, dolphin would probably prefer to eat the kind of fish they usually eat. It is very rare in the animal kingdom that you can introduce a new type of food to an animal which it will like a lot better than what it is used to.