For a lot of us, a day where we don’t run into any sharks is a good one. As majestic and graceful as they can be, we’ve also seen what happens when they get mad and the last thing we want is to be on the business end of those teeth.
However, for one particular team of Australian researchers, a day with no sharks is a bitter disappointment because they had some special plans for any that ended up approaching them.
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And the full video shows what happens when those plans work out.
Oliver Jewell, a PhD student from Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, assembled a team to put a camera on some sharks.
According to Murdoch University , they did this by luring great whites to their boat off the coast of South Africa with chum and a seal decoy like the one this shark is attacking.
Once they got a bite, they would use a fishing rod-like device to attach a camera and motion sensor to its dorsal fin.
In total, they did this with eight different sharks and collected 28 hours of footage.
This was done to show exactly what happens after a shark chases a Cape fur seal to its hiding place in nearby kelp forests.
As Jewell told Murdoch University, “In the past we would have to guess. We would track sharks to the edge of the kelp forest but then lose the signal.”
As far as they could tell, the sharks would wait at the edge of these kelp forests to ambush any seals who tried to get out.
After all, they figured, there was no way that something as large as a great white shark could navigate the cramped kelp forests and continue their pursuit.
But when the footage was collected, even those who had studied sharks for 15 years were surprised by the results.
Not only could the sharks push through the kelp, Jewell and his team discovered that they could even make 180-degree turns in an environment that would normally prevent such wide movements from a large creature.
The full video doesn’t show all 28 hours on these sharks’ travels, but it does include some illuminating highlights.
Among them are scenes that show what happens when a great white has a seal in its sights.
Although it’s hard to make out when a seal is there, a telltale sign occurs when the footage shows bubbles, as the seals blow these behind them to try and stay out of a shark’s sight.
However, at no point does the footage show any shark eating a seal.
This isn’t because the science team wanted to shield us from any gruesome sights, but rather because none of the cameras captured footage of the sharks actually catching up to their prey.
So although the sharks have no problem entering kelp forests, it seems they still provide enough cover for the seals to give them the slip.
Still, the fact that they could enter the forests at all astonished the team and Jewell was interested in finding out if sharks around California and southern Australia show the same behavior.
But putting this all together wasn’t easy, as there was no guarantee that a shark would even show up while the team was out.
And once they did get the camera attached, the ending of the full video shows an instance of a common problem: The kelp would often knock the cameras off the sharks.
The full video is available here .
h/t: Murdoch University
