Great white sharks may not be the ocean’s most fearsome predators after all.

New research has found the hunters become the hunted when killer whales are on the scene.

“When confronted by orcas, great white sharks will immediately vacate their preferred hunting ground and will not return for up to a year,” lead author Salvador Jorgensen, a senior research scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium, said.

Great white sharks may not be the ocean’s most fearsome predators after all. (AP/AAP)

Scientists analysed four encounters between great white sharks, killer whales and elephant seals at Southeast Farallon Island, an island marine sanctuary and shared foraging site off San Francisco in the US.

They found that the sharks – some more than five metres long - sped away within minutes of the orcas visiting, even though the whales were just passing through.

“After orcas show up, we don’t see a single shark — and there are no more kills,” Monterey Bay Aquarium scientist Scot Anderson said.

A new study shows great white sharks are freaked out by orcas (pictured). (PA/AAP)

In addition to analysing the four shark/orca encounters, the scientists examined the movements of 165 great white sharks tagged with a GPS between 2006 and 2013, and 27 years of population data of orcas, sharks and seals collected by Point Blue Conservation Science.

The surprising beneficiary of the sharks’ swift exit were elephant seals, who were killed much less frequently in the seasons when the whales appeared.

“We don’t typically think about how fear and risk aversion might play a role in shaping where large predators hunt and how that influences ocean ecosystems,” Jorgensen says.

“It turns out these risk effects are very strong even for large predators like white sharks — strong enough to redirect their hunting activity to less preferred but safer areas.”