Recently, National Geographic reports, on a spearfishing dive off Apalachicola, Florida, Grayson Shepard was interrupted by several goliath groupers who availed themselves of the snapper he’d caught. Oh well. Plenty of fish in the sea!

Shepard’s garbled frustration is audible in the video he took of the submarine incident. “Godsaslfdslfnasdljfn,” he says. “Fucasdlkafsadfs. KLSDFJasf.”

At one point, a grouper drags him along by his spear. “I weigh 220 lbs., and it dragged me easily 20 feet or so before letting go,” Shepard told NatGeo in an email. His spear was bent “so badly it will no longer load into my speargun.”

According to R. Grant Gilmore, a fish ecologist at the Florida-based company Estuarine, Coastal and Ocean Science, goliath groupers can live to be 50 years old and can learn and remember human behavior. In fact, he said, they were probably following Shepard around.

“No question about it. They probably know his boat by the sound of it,” Gilmore said. Goliath groupers, which can grow up to nine feet long and weigh 800 pounds, are ambush predators: They “prey predominantly on slow-moving animals. A speared snapper on the end of a spear-gun is a slow-moving animal.”

In an email, Sylvia Earle, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence (what a title!), wrote, “Thinking like an ocean, it is clear that the diver, not the grouper, is doing the stealing.” Dang.

H/T Digg. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.