A scientist and a wildlife filmmaker captured potentially rare photos and video of a newborn great white shark seen swimming just off the coast of California near Santa Barbara. Footage taken by drone last July is sparking skeptical excitement among experts eager to understand one of the most mysterious aspects of these fearsome predators: where they started life.
“Where white sharks give birth to their young remains one of the ocean’s great mysteries,” Tobey Curtis, a fisheries management specialist and shark ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in an email. “Observations of free-swimming newborn white sharks are extremely rare and any new video or photographic evidence could be invaluable.”
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In a study published Monday in the journal Environmental Biology of Fish, the team describes seeing a 1.5-meter-long baby shark shedding a whitish coat. The team suggests that the material may be embryonic fluid, possibly signaling a newborn only a few hours old. Or they accept that the young shark may have a skin condition.
It’s nearly impossible to get a definitive answer given the limitations of observing these elusive animals from a distance. But the team was eager to detail their observations in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, perhaps prompting a search for further evidence.
“I can only speak from my observations, but this shark was moving very erratically, almost like it was exploring everything in a unique way,” said wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna, known as The Malibu Artist on YouTube and Instagram. He found the shark after a long day flying drones on the beach with Phillip Sternes, a graduate student and shark scientist at the University of California, Riverside. “He looked clumsy because of the way he swam. “It was a little shaky.”
However, several outside shark experts said they were skeptical of the interpretation that this shark was a newborn. They cautioned that even if this idea were true, it was difficult to know from a single observation what that observation meant about the species.
“I appreciate the authors coming up with this, but I think they need to be careful about how they sell it,” said Christopher Lowe, a professor of marine biology at California State University at Long Beach and director of the Shark Lab. is not included in the study.
Lowe said the animal was “definitely a young shark” but supported the idea that it might have a skin condition, adding that it could also be scientifically interesting.
“We don’t get a chance to take care of them much because they sink when they get sick and die. “You rarely have access to animals that have some kind of disease or genetic deformity,” Lowe said.
Despite widespread interest in great whites, most of what is known about the pregnancies and births of these sharks comes from fragmentary observations. This is partly because great whites are migratory and spend most of their lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and historically the technology to track them from a distance has not been available.
“A lot of people say, ‘I thought we knew everything about sharks, they’re on the Discovery Channel all the time,'” Lowe said. However, when it comes to great white pregnancies, “everything we know comes from about eight females…they are very elusive and very cautious about where they mate and give birth.”
Gauna learned about the habits of great whites by spending thousands of hours observing and documenting their behavior using drones; It often showed in vivid detail how close they lived to humans.
In the summer of 2021, he noticed something unusual. The coast of Southern California is known to be a playground for young sharks. But he also saw some really big, girth animals for about three weeks in late June and early July. He saw them the following summer and again in 2023.
To definitively determine a shark’s sex, researchers look under its belly and identify the claspers (appendages) that appear on the undersides of male sharks. But Gauna suspected that these might be pregnant women and asked Sternes if he would like to go out and do field work for a day.
Sternes and Gauna arrived at a beach near the city of Carpinteria at 8:30 a.m. on a calm, sunny Sunday in July. At around 5:30 p.m., when they used their second-to-last drone batteries, a small white shark came into view swimming near the spot where Gauna had seen one of the larger sharks diving downwards, out of sight. camera.
“What is this?” Sternes said.
Great white sharks are actually gray on their upperparts, so an all-white animal would appear to be albino. This also had rounded fins rather than the pointed fins that are distinctive of the species; this was the sign of a young great white.
But later, when they were able to examine the images in more detail, they noticed something even more interesting: The white color was a layer that was falling off the shark.
In their article, Sternes and Gauna suggest that this shark may have been less than a day old. For starters, location makes perfect sense.
Mature females tracked by satellite tags in the eastern North Pacific migrate to the middle ocean between Baja, California and Hawaii, Lowe said. They spend about a year there before migrating to the coast of California or Mexico, known as nurseries where young sharks live. Where females will give birth along this path is still an open question.
Pioneering shark expert A. Peter Klimley said in a 1985 paper that he suggested that white sharks spawn in late summer and early fall in waters south of Point Conception, a headland in Santa Barbara County. The area appears to have expanded towards the north.
Then there’s the estimated size of the shark. Pregnant females are sometimes caught with nearly full-term cubs inside, each 4 to 5 feet long. Sternes and Gauna consulted a colleague to estimate the size of this shark at about 1.5 meters, but noted that there was still some uncertainty.
Scientists also know that shark embryos are bathed in a buttermilk-like liquid in their mothers’ wombs, Lowe said. Sternes and Gauna suspect that the white coating they saw on the young shark may be from this liquid residue.
But Robert Hueter, senior science advisor at OCEARCH, a nonprofit organization that supports great white research, said he does not know of any evidence that this intrauterine milk will form a coating on newborns.
Hueter added that these observations were presented at a meeting in Australia last year and attracted the attention of experts there, but they were not convinced that this was a newborn shark.
“With white sharks, we know where the pups of the year are, we know where the pups are… but where the actual pupation occurs is still undefined,” Hueter said. “Unless we can sample that white film and determine exactly what it is, we can’t really rule out that this is an animal with some kind of skin disorder.”
Other scientists said documenting similar whitish sharks or collecting a sample from the film would help determine what they saw.
Gauna and Sternes agree, and Gauna said he is developing a plan for 24-hour surveillance during this time this summer.
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