Last summer, the first ever images of a newborn Great White Shark were taken off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. These monumental images were captured by wildlife photographer and filmmaker, Carlos Guana. According to a post he wrote on Instagram, the footage was part of a white shark research paper that he co-authored with UC-Riverside shark scientist Phil Sternes.
Sternes explained that they could observe the shark’s “white layer” shedding off as it swam, which appeared to be its mother’s intrauterine milk, secreted during pregnancy. Guana said that he had previously seen pregnant great whites in the area, including a sighting just three days prior to the sighting of the newborn.
“Where white sharks giving birth is one of the holy grails of shark science,” Guana wrote in an instagram post “ no one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive.”
Oliver Shipley, a local marine biologist and shark expert at Stony Brook University, explains that this discovery is exciting because it “provides a relatively precise location as to where white sharks might be giving birth, off the coast of California… This provides kind of a small piece of that puzzle, suggesting that they might be birthing animals close to where the pupping grounds are.”
Newborn Great Whites are hard to pinpoint because of their vast territory, making them an extremely rare sighting. And while this discovery may not deliver much of a benefit for the preservation of white sharks, it is still an exciting discovery nonetheless.
