Great white jumps at leftovers chance
A great white shark cruising around Bluff appears to have developed a taste for meat pies.
Aucklander Rose Gullery said she was doing a cage dive off the coast of the South Island yesterday, encountering three of the animals in the water.
As the tour with Shark Dive NZ was wrapping up, someone threw a leftover mince pie from lunch into the water – only to see a great white leap at the chance to eat it.
Gullery caught the shark’s spectacular gulp on camera. Clearly, the tuna the crew had been throwing in the water hadn’t hit the spot.
‘‘We’d just finished our lunch, which was the classic Kiwi lunch: a pie,’’ Gullery said.
‘‘There were some leftovers and we just chucked them in the ocean.
‘‘One of the girls said wouldn’t it be funny if a shark came up and had a pie for lunch? Literally two seconds later, one did.’’
This rare behaviour is called breaching, and great whites usually do it in order to catch fastmoving prey like seals, rather than floating pastries.
The warm early summer brought with it ocean temperatures that are on average 8 degrees Celsius higher compared to the average for this time of year – and with it, an upsurge in great white shark sightings.
Around 5500 great white sharks are lurking in the waters between New Zealand and Australia, new world-first genetic analysis by the CSIRO research institute has revealed.
There are about 750 adults in waters east off Victoria’s southern coast, up to central Queensland and across to New Zealand.
Taking juvenile sharks into account, researchers believe the total population off the Australian east coast sits at 5460 – but could be as high as 12,800.
Fishermen Logan Booler and skipper Lewis Brown were among those to sight a great white this year:
The two were on board a small fishing boat near Wenderholm, north of Auckland, when a 2-metre shark swam up close to the boat, taking them by surprise. The skipper said he felt vulnerable, but Booler was ‘‘amazed’’.