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Experts believe they’ve captured rare footage of a great white shark baby in the wild for the very first time.
Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes filmed the animal using a drone off the coast of Santa Barbara in southern California back in July.
Releasing a statement about the footage, Sternes said: “In my opinion, this one was likely hours, maybe one day old at most.
“We enlarged the images, put them in slow motion, and realized the white layer was being shed from the body as it was swimming. I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”
In peer-reviewed findings, published on Monday, the experts said that the shark was either a newborn, or an older shark with “an unknown skin disorder resulting in shedding” – but the authors leaned towards the shark being a newborn due to the presence of large and likely pregnant great whites in the area, along with the creature’s shape and size.
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