‘It’s Jaws. It’s Jaws. It’s Jaws’
Startled onlookers watch as a great white consumes a seal in the San Francisco Bay.
Cellphone video captures a great white shark’s feeding habits in San Francisco Bay.
Cellphone video captured the dramatic moment when a group of stunned tourists got a firsthand look at a great white shark’s feeding habits as it devoured a seal and left a pool of blood near Alcatraz Island.
The video is the first to show a great white’s feeding habits in the San Francisco Bay, said David McGuire, director of the San Franciscobased shark conservation group Shark Stewards.
“For me it’s pretty exciting and a sign that the health is returning to the San Francisco Bay ecosystem,” McGuire said in a statement. “We swim in the Bay every day at the Dolphin Club without a shark encounter. It’s why we call this month Sharktober.”
In the video shot by Meredith Coppolo Shindler, startled tourists waiting on the Alcatraz Island dock for a ferry Saturday watched as the shark consumed the seal.
The 8- to 10-foot shark gulped the seal carcass just feet from the dock, said McGuire, a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences.
A sea of red lingered on the water’s surface as the shark’s fins emerged.
“It’s right under us,” a boy says in the video. “It’s Jaws. It’s Jaws. It’s Jaws.”
Soon after the feeding frenzy began, the shark disappeared.
“That’s the best thing I have ever seen in my life,” the boy said.
Great white sharks have been seen in San Francisco Bay before. Over a two-year period, five great whites entered the bay, one of them four times, according to a 2009 study by the Tagging of Pacific Predators program.
Officials have documented only one shark-related fatality in San Francisco, McGuire said. Albert Kogler Jr., 18, died after a shark attacked him off Baker Beach on May 7, 1959, he said.
“The risk of shark attack is extremely low,” McGuire said.
In Southern California, experts say a possible record-breaking El Niño has been attracting dozens of sharks to the area as their food sources migrate.