NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - For as much time and money as people have spent studying and filming great white sharks, no one has ever witnessed one being born. But new footage out of California might be the next best thing.
On July 9, 2023, filmmaker Carlos Gauna and organismal biologist Phillip Sternes were following sharks with a drone off the coast of Santa Barbara. They’d already captured footage of a few larger great whites, but then something completely unexpected drifted up out of the murk.
“Toward the end of the day this peculiar-looking white shark appeared, and we were both super excited,” says Sternes, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside.