Great white sighting may reveal a ‘holy grail’ of shark science
CNN
Drone footage shot off the coast of Southern California may have enabled the first ever sighting of a newborn great white shark in the wild.
Drone footage shot off the coast of Southern California may have revealed the first ever glimpse of a newborn great white shark in the wild. The 1.5-meter-long (5-foot-long) white shark was spotted on July 9, 2023, 400 meters (1,300 feet) off the coast of Carpinteria, California, by wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes, a doctoral student in the department of biology at University of California Riverside, while they were shooting aerial video and images. Its pale coloring and size immediately struck the duo as unusual. Adult great white sharks are gray on top and white underneath. Gauna and Sternes examined the images and video in the viewfinder of the drone camera and noticed a thin, white film covering the shark that was sloughing off the animal as it moved. “We enlarged the images, put them in slow motion, and realized the white layer was being shed from the body as it was swimming,” Sternes said in a news release. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.” While in utero, embryonic sharks feed on unfertilized eggs for protein. The mothers offer additional nourishment to the growing shark pups with a milk secreted in the uterus. It’s some of this material that Gauna and Sternes believe gives the shark its unusual coloring.
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