It was a sensation even for wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna, known to many viewers as “The Malibu Artist.” Its archive contains thousands of hours of footage about the lives of sharks. Gauna was close to the animals and observed them hunting and mating. On July 9, 2023, he was traveling with biologist Phillip Sternes from the University of California Riverside off the coast of California, near Santa Barbara, when he discovered an unusual creature in the viewfinder of his drone camera: a pure white little one that was only 1.5 meters tall Shark: most likely a newborn great white shark, like Gauna and Sternes now in the specialist magazine Environmental Biology of Fishes to report.
“We enlarged the images, set them to slow motion, and noticed a white shell that separated from the body while swimming,” says Sternes, according to a press release from the University of California. “I believe it was a newborn great white shark just breaking free from its embryonic shell.” The cub was probably only a few hours old, or a day at most.
If this is true, the video recording is the first to document a newborn shark species, which is also scientifically significant. “Where great white sharks give birth is one of the great mysteries of shark science,” says Carlos Gauna. “So far, only dead great white sharks have been found in dead pregnant mothers. But never anything comparable to this.” Gauna had already filmed three large pregnant females in the region in the days before the new recording. On the day of the new sighting, one of these animals had dived downwards, possibly it was the mother of the young animal. According to Sternes, his birthplace would have been only around 300 meters from the beach. A clear indication that great white sharks give birth in shallow waters, not far from humans. Bathers don’t have to worry too much. Only three to seven unprovoked attacks by great white sharks on humans are recorded each year. Of these, however, 20 percent end fatally.