Researchers in California may have gotten their hands on a newborn great white shark for the first time ever, which they captured in drone footage taken last summer.
The newborn animal has never been spotted in the wild before. But in July, wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes, a biology doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside, saw something unexpected in the waters near Santa Barbara on California’s central coast.
Gauna’s drone camera captured what appeared to be a great white shark pup, about 5 feet long and pure white – an unusual color as sharks are white on the bottom and gray on top.
“We enlarged the images, put them in slow motion and realized the white layer was shedding off the body as it swam,” Sternes said. university statement. “I believe it was a newborn white shark that shed its embryonic layer.”
Sternes and Gauna, who have filmed sharks around the world in YouTube videos that have millions of views, documented their findings in an article published this week in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.
In the article, the couple acknowledge that the thin white film covering the shark could have been the result of a skin condition, but say they believe it was a newborn great white. The animal they saw was within the size range of newborn sharks and its appearance was similar to short-term embryos, they wrote.
Gauna said he had previously observed large great whites in the area that appeared to be pregnant and the newborn shark emerged within the time frame for pups to be born. In the university statement, he describes the finding as “one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to determine where they were born, and no one has ever seen a newborn baby shark alive.”
They suspect the animal they documented was days or hours old.
“There are many hypothetical areas, but despite intense interest in these sharks, no one has seen a birth or a newborn pup in the wild,” Sternes said. “This may very well be the first evidence we have of a pup in the wild, making it a definitive birthplace.”
Experts in the field mostly commented on the find CNNand calls the observation “tremendously significant”.
