A baby great white shark has been caught on camera for the first time off the coast of California by researchers.
While great white sharks are well known in the cinema, they are relatively elusive in the wild – for obvious reasons, getting close to them to observe their behaviour is difficult – and little is known, for example, about their reproductive habits and their young.
But, while using a drone to film sharks, filmmaker Carlos Guana and California Riverside PhD candidate Phillip Sternes, saw a small fish swimming among larger great whites. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a newborn great white – just 1.5 meters long.
It was also white – which adults aren’t. It seems newborns have a white layer, which is shed after birth, leaving the grey colour they usually have. Sternes said that the white layer was shedding as the shark swam.
The discovery backed up a long-standing suspicion that great whites populate an area from Santa Barbara in California to north Baja California in Mexico when they are giving birth. There have been numerous reports over the years of young white sharks being spotted in the area, but it wasn’t known if the sharks gave birth there or came to the area soon after giving birth further out at sea.
Gauna, known online as The Malibu Artist, has spent thousands of hours filming sharks around the world, and his videos of them swimming close to beachgoers have millions of views. What he and Sternes observed could help solve the longstanding mystery of 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.”
Great whites are listed as an international endangered species. “Further research is needed to confirm these waters are indeed a great white breeding ground. But if it does, we would want lawmakers to step in and protect these waters to help white sharks keep thriving,” Sternes said.
The observations are documented in a new paper in the Environmental Biology of Fishes journal.
