Great white sighting may reveal a ‘holy grail’ of shark science
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-metre-long white shark was spotted on July 9, 2023, 400 metres 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 colouring and size immediately struck the duo as unusual. Adult great white sharks are grey 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 t...