A drone photographer and a shark researcher out of UC Riverside captured extraordinary footage of a pup thought to be only hours old, in what could be the first footage of a newborn white shark.
The images taken off of Santa Barbara’s central coast last year are a significant moment in documenting great white sharks and the subject of a new paper in the Environmental Biology of Fishes journal, UC Riverside officials said in an announcement this week.
“Great whites, the largest predatory sharks in the world with the most fatal attacks on humans, are tough to imagine as newborn babies,” university officials said. “That is partially because no one has seen one in the wild, it seems, until now.”
The footage was taken by wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and UC Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes, who were scanning the waters for sharks on July 9 near Santa Barbara. Gauna has been documenting the increase in shark populations since 2017, following an influx seen off the Southern California coastline during the 2015 and 2016 warm water El Nino years.
While white sharks are typically gray on top and white on the bottom, this 5-foot shark was pure white.
“We enlarged the images, put them in slow motion, and realized the white layer was being shed from the body as it was swimming,” Sternes said in the announcement. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”
The footage could help piece together the mysterious great white birthing habits.
“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive,” Gauna said. “There have been dead white sharks found inside deceased pregnant mothers. But nothing like this.”
It is possible the white film the shark shed could have been a skin condition, however the pair do not believe this to be the case.
“If that is what we saw, then that…
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