You are looking at the first pic of a great white newborn
– For as much time and money as people have spent studying and filming great white sharks, no-one has ever witnessed one being born. But new footage out of California might be the next best thing.
On 9 July last year, filmmaker Carlos Gauna and organismal biologist Phillip Sternes were following sharks with a drone off the coast of Santa Barbara. They’d already captured footage of a few larger great whites, but then something completely unexpected drifted up out of the murk.
“Toward the end of the day, this peculiar-looking white shark appeared and we were both super excited,” says Sternes, a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside.
At just under 1.5m long with chubby, rounded fins, the duo knew they were looking at a very young great white. (For comparison, adult great whites can stretch up to 6.5m long.) But as the drone zoomed in, it caught something never seen before: a milky white film that appeared to flake off the young shark’s tail as it swam.
While no one can say for sure what the white material is, Sternes suggests it may be a sort of uterine “milk” used to nourish newborn sharks in the womb. Another possibility is that the shark has a skin condition that has never been described before.
“Both scenarios are highly significant,” says Sternes who, together with Gauna, co-authored a study announcing the findings in the journal, Environmental Biology of Fishes.
While juvenile great whites have been previously spotted in the wild, experts said footage of a newly born pup could shed light on a long-standing mystery in shark science and improve conservation efforts.
“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science,” said Gauna. “No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive.”
Gauna – known online as The Malibu Artist – and Sternes obenforcement served an apparently heavily pregnant great white shark near Santa Barbara. The shark appeared to dive deep into the water and not long after, a smaller shark emerged at the surface, and looked directly towards the camera hovering above.
Gauna said they initially thought the completely white little shark was an albino, because great white sharks – referred to only as white sharks by scientists – are actually grey on top and white only on their undersides.
But then they saw the shark appear to shed the white layer from its body as it clumsily swam around, he said.
Southern California is known to be a nursing ground for young white sharks, while the central Californian coast has been tipped as a potential birthing spot and Gauana had seen pregnant and young white sharks in the area before this sighting.
“This may well be the first evidence we have of a pup in the wild, making this a definitive birthing location,” Sternes said in a press release, adding that more research would be needed to confirm the area more generally as a birthing ground.
If it is, Sternes said that would put pressure on lawmakers to protect the waters.
“This paper rightly claims that it is the first immediate post-birth sighting of a white shark,” said Heike Zidowitz, senior programme officer for marine species conservation at the The World Wide Fund for Nature in Germany.
The sharks are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. –