Screen capture: The Malibu Artist/Carlos Gauna
Carlos Gauna is a filmmaker and professional photographer based in Southern California who has shot an impressive portfolio of drone videos of sharks for his YouTube channel TheMalibuArtist.
On July 9, 2023, Carlos captured some truly remarkable video and photos of a very small pale white shark swimming not quite half a kilometer off the coast of Carpinteria, CA.
He had already seen large great white sharks in the area but this small shark was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Based on the height of the drone and the lens crop factor, the shark appeared to be slightly smaller than 5 feet long. Upon close examination of video and photos, the tiny shark’s pale color appeared to be a thin white film, and that, as the shark was swimming, the whitish film was being sloughed off.
The BBC reports that at the time, Carlos was with shark researcher Phil Sternes, from the University of California, Riverside, who could not believe what he was seeing.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, this could be a newborn’,” he says. “We’re both falling out of our seats with excitement at that point. It was quite a moment.”
What got Phil particularly excited was the shape of the shark, whose fins were more rounded than usual. That is something you see in shark embryos and newborns. He says the white layer could have been evidence the shark had just been born and still had a mucus-like substance on its body.
Another possibility is that the shark had a skin condition that has never been described before.
“Both scenarios are highly significant,” says Sternes, who together with Gauna co-authored a study announcing the findings today in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.
“This is extremely rare. White shark birthing locations have remained extremely elusive for the scientific community,” Sternes told National Geographic in an email. “We think we have a piece to the puzzle now. If this is a birthing location, conservation aspects must be considered.”