Amazing feeding frenzy as sharks, dolphins and gannets gang up on a shoal of sardines

Swirling in panic thousands of silvery sardines flash past as they strive to escape a horde of predators.

While a pod of dolphins chivy the fish into a 'baitball' from beneath, black-tip and tiger sharks marshall them upwards and ganets dive bomb them from above.

As the sardines move in unison towards the surface a feeding frenzy breaks out, with the entire shoal obliterated in minutes.

The incredible spectacle occurs every year off the rugged east coast of South Africa.

Known as the Sardine Run, billions of fish migrate up the KwaZulu-Natal coast in search of tasty cold water zooplankton in June and July.

The fish instinctively group and move together to try and confuse predators but their hunters have honed an impressive technique in which they work together as an unlikely team to pick them off.

Such events once took place regularly in the seas of Europe and the oceans of the Americas but these areas have long since been fished out of sardines.