by A wildlife scientist and filmmaker captured rare photos and video of a newborn great white shark, seen swimming just off the coast of California near Santa Barbara. The footage, filmed with a drone last July, is causing both excitement and skepticism among experts eager to understand one of the most enigmatic aspects of these fearsome solitary predators: where they start in life.
“Where great white sharks give birth is one of the great mysteries of the ocean,” Tobey Curtis, a fisheries management specialist and shark ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in an email. “It is very rare for newborn white sharks to be seen free-swimming, and any video or photographic evidence could be very valuable.”
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In a study published Monday in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes, the team describes seeing a five-foot-long shark pulp with a bright layer. The team argues that the material could be embryonic fluid, signaling a possible newborn that may be only an hour old. Or, they admit, the young shark may have a skin condition.
It is almost impossible to get a definitive answer given the limitations of observing these animals that have not yet been found remotely. But the team was keen to detail their observations in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and perhaps help search for more evidence.
“I can only speak from my observations, but this shark was moving a lot – not erratically, but almost like it was exploring things uniquely,” said Carlos Gauna, a wildlife filmmaker known as the Malibu artist on YouTube and Instagram. He found the shark at the end of a long day flying drones from the beach with Phillip Sternes, a shark scientist and graduate student at the University of California at Riverside. “He looked clumsy, the way he was swimming. It was kind of wobbly.”
But some outside shark experts said they were skeptical of the interpretation that this shark had just been born. Even if that notion is correct, they cautioned that it is difficult to know from a single observation what this sighting means about the species.
“I appreciate the authors getting this out there, but I think they need to be careful about how they sell it,” said Christopher Lowe, professor of marine biology and director of the Shark Lab at California State University at Long Beach, which was not related to the work.
Lowe says the animal is “definitely a young shark” but favors the idea that it could have a skin condition – which he said would also be scientifically interesting.
“We don’t often get a chance to look at them, because when they get sick and die, they sink. You rarely get access to animals that have some kind of disease or genetic deformities,” said Lowe.
Despite widespread interest in great whites, most of what is known about the pregnancies and births of these sharks comes from fragmented observations. That’s partly because great whites are migratory and spend much of their lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and historically the technology hasn’t existed to follow them remotely.
“A lot of people say, ‘I thought we knew everything about sharks, they’re on the Discovery Channel all the time,'” Lowe said. However, with regard to great white pregnancies, “everything we know comes from eight females … they are very elusive, and very discreet about where they meet and give birth birth.”
Gauna learned the habits of great whites by spending thousands of hours observing and documenting their behavior using drones – often showing in vivid detail how close they are to humans.
In the summer of 2021, he noticed something unusual. The southern coast of California is known to be a playground for young sharks. But for about three weeks at the end of June and the beginning of July, he also saw some really big, girthy animals. He saw them again the following summer, and again in 2023.
To tell the shark’s sex definitively, the researchers look at its underside and identify claspers – appendages that appear on the undersides of male sharks. But Ghauna suspected that these might be pregnant women, so he asked Sternes if he wanted to come out and do some fieldwork for a day.
Sternes and Gauna arrived at a beach near the city of Carpinteria at 8:30 am on a calm, sunny Sunday in July. It wasn’t until about 5:30 pm, when they were on their second-to-last drone battery, that a small white shark swam in sight near a spot where Ghana was one of the big sharks diving down from sight. the camera.
“What is that?” Sternes said.
Great white sharks are actually gray on top, so the white animal looked like it could be an albino. This one also had rounded fins instead of the species’ signature fins – a sign of a young great white.
But later, when they were able to look more closely at the film, they noticed something even more interesting: The white color was a layer that was falling off the shark.
In their paper, Sternes and Gauna make the case that this shark could be less than a day old. First, the site is highly recommended.
Lowe said that in the eastern North Pacific, mature females tracked with satellite tags migrate out into the mid-ocean between Baja, Calif., and Hawaii. They spend a year or so out there before heading back to the coasts of California or Mexico, which are known to be nurseries where young sharks live. It is still an open question where on that path women give birth.
Pioneering shark expert A. Peter Klimley said in a paper published in 1985 that he suggested white sharks were born in late summer and would drop early in the waters south of Point Conception, a promontory in Santa Barbara County. he said, the pupping seems to have increased the area to the north.
Then there is the estimated size of the shark. Sometimes pregnant females are caught with nearly full-term pups inside, each 4 to 5 feet long. Sternes and Gauna consulted a colleague to estimate the size of this shark at about five feet, although they noted that there are still some uncertainties.
Scientists also know that shark embryos are bathed in a buttermilk-like liquid in their mother’s uterus, Lowe said. Sternes and Gauna suspect that the white coating they saw on the young shark may have been some of the remaining liquid.
But Robert Hueter, senior scientific advisor for OCEARCH, a non-profit that supports large white research, said he knows of no evidence that this intrauterine milk would be a shield for newborns.
Hueter also said that these observations were presented at a meeting in Australia last year, and that there were experts but they were not sure that this was a newborn shark.
“With white sharks, we know where the young of the year are, we know where the nurseries are … but there’s still no definition of where the pup is going,” Hueter said. “Unless we can sample that white film and determine exactly what it is, we can’t rule out that this is an animal with some kind of skin disorder.”
Other scientists said that documenting similar white sharks, or collecting a sample of the footage, would help them figure out what they were seeing.
Gauna and Sternes agree, and Gauna said he has already developed a plan for 2012 hourly surveillance this summer around this time frame.
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