Researchers report first sighting of newborn great white shark

By Katie Hunt | CNN

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-meter-long (5-foot-long) white shark was spotted on July 9, 2023, 400 meters (1,300 feet) 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 coloring and size immediately struck the duo as unusual. Adult great white sharks are gray 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 the images, put them in slow motion, and realized the white layer was being shed from the body as it was swimming,” Sternes said in a news release. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”

The case for the baby great white sighting

While in utero, embryonic sharks feed on unfertilized eggs for protein. The mothers offer additional nourishment to the growing shark pups with a milk secreted in the uterus. It’s some of this material that Gauna and Sternes believe gives the shark its unusual coloring.

They documented their observations in a study published Monday in the peer-reviewed Environmental Biology of Fishes journal.

“Given that white sharks produce uterine milk, it is within the realm of possibility that either this fluid or another fluid could have adhered to the shark right before birth,” the authors noted in the study.

If their assessment is correct, it’s the first time that a newborn great white shark has been observed in the wild.

“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive,” Gauna said in the news release. “There have been dead white sharks found inside deceased pregnant mothers. But nothing like this.”

An alternative explanation for the shark’s whitish color could be that it was cause by an unknown skin disorder, according to the study. However, Gauna and Sternes said they believe the most plausible answer is that the creature they observed is a newborn great white, according to the news release.

Its shape and size were indicative of a newborn: thin with rounded fin apexes, the study noted. In addition, other researchers have suggested this location off the coast of central California is a birthing ground for great white sharks.

Gauna and Sternes also noted in the study that mature sharks were spotted in the same area on the same day and the day before the footage was captured.

“In my opinion, this one was likely hours, maybe one day old at most,” Sternes said.

Speculative finding?

Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida and a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said it is possible the sighting was a newborn great white shark, but added that the finding is “highly speculative.”

“White sharks typically have between 8 and 12 pups at a time, so where are all the others,” Naylor, who wasn’t involved in the study, said via email.