Note: As any ichthyologist or marine biologist worth his/her salt can tell you, sharks don't chew. Their teeth and jaws simply are not designed for that. They bite, tear, and swallow with all kinds of sharkly aplomb, but chewing is beyond them. Literally, then, the expression "you bit off more than you can chew" will ALWAYS apply to you if you are a shark, since regardless of how small a bite you take, you won't be able to chew it.

In the wake of such ichthyo-pedantic criticism, what expression should we use? We can't say "your eyes are bigger than your stomach" because a shark's eyes are not bigger than its stomach -- the stomach has to be quite large to accomodate all that unchewed food. Any number of meaning-rich metaphors will similarly fail in the pallid face of scholarly critique, leaving us with naught but the dry, factual summary: "the shark died because what it thought to be large, helpless prey turned out to be a dangerous creature with equally dangerous friends."

Of course, we should then have to follow up with supporting points, gleaned in part from independent research, and the whole mess would have to be formatted into a double-spaced dissertation entitled "Non-Native Organisms and Defensive Counter-Predation," carefully obfuscating the fact that a giant soldier punched a shark's lights out.

I know, I know. Sharks don't HAVE lights.