A wildlife filmmaker and a biology student believe they may have captured the first-ever footage of a newborn great white shark.
Carlos Gauna, a wildlife filmmaker, and Phillip Sternes, a UC Riverside biology doctoral student, used a drone to film a 5-foot-long white shark swimming 1,300 feet off the coast of Carpinteria, California, when they made the discovery on July 9, 2023, according to a statement from the university.
“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 press release. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”
The duo observed a shark with a pale color that looked like a thin white film covering its body. According to the press release, the whitish film was being sloughed off as the shark swam. Large, likely mature sharks were recorded in the same area before and after, according to the duo’s observations. The shark’s pale color could be because of intrauterine substances being sloughed off due to it being a newborn shark or an unknown skin disorder not reported before in white sharks – the presence of which would be a significant finding on its own, Guana said .