A group of fishermen were shocked to see a shark they had caught being swallowed whole by an enormous grouper fish off the Florida coast.

The group were fishing off the coast of the coast of Bonita Springs, but when they managed to hook a 4ft (1.2m) shark, a huge Atlantic goliath grouper or “itajara” saw its opportunity for a meal and jumped out of the water to eat the shark in a single bite.

Itajaras can grow to lengths of up to 3m and can weigh as much as 360kg, and are found in the waters off the coast of Florida, Brazil, and around much of the Caribbean, where they are known to target sharks, octopuses and barracudas as prey.

The fish was pushed to the brink of extinction in the late 1980s until harvest bans on the species were brought in by the US and Caribbean. Its numbers have since begun to recover, but it remains a critically endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).