Senior Editor
Staff

The Inertia

On July 9th, 2023, Carlos Gauna was flying his drone over the ocean near Santa Barbara, California. He, along with UC Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes, was looking for great white sharks — something he does very often for his YouTube channel, The Malibu Artist — but this day was different than all the rest. Different because what he thought he saw in his viewfinder was something that no one had ever seen before: a newborn great white shark.

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

When Gauna and Sternes had the drone back safely on land, they were excited to see if they had filmed what they hoped they’d filmed.

“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 press release. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”

The images ended up being the focus of a new paper that was published in a journal called The Environmental Biology of Fishes. In it, Gauna and Sternes do admit that the shedding skin could potentially be some sort of skin condition, but neither of them believe that’s a likely explanation.

“I just don’t see how a skin disorder explains this,” Gauna said “Given the size of the shark; given the unique roundness of that dorsal fin – they can’t give birth with a dorsal fin that’s straight and long, straight, and pointed. They have to be rounded in order to exit… If [a skin condition] is what we saw, then that too is monumental because no such condition has ever been reported for these sharks.”

As is generally the case when something that’s never seen before is finally seen, the media and the scientific community were quick to share the incredible news. Although Gauna is certainly very knowledgeable when it comes to sharks, he’s quick to make sure that no one mistakes him for something he’s not.

“I’m not a marine biologist,” he writes in a disclaimer. “As with all YouTube content, I encourage independent verification of facts via official scientific and trustworthy sources. I will strive to post citations for any information I discuss here whenever possible. My goal is to use photography and drones to bring awareness to wildlife and the nature around us. I welcome collaborations with scientists to bring cinematic elements to the educational presentation.”

After the initial video and the ensuing scientific paper gained so much traction, Gauna decided it would be interesting to explain the findings a little more, how they came to their conclusion, and why the footage could be so important.

“In this video, we take a deeper look into our manuscript documenting what may be the first sighting of a freshly newborn shark on record,” he wrote. “While it’s been largely reports as a 5 foot long white shark, that is the top and most conservative end of the shark’s size. We used a very thorough size measurement equation formulated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist James Worthington that utilized all data from the drones sensor and the comparison of pixels of a nearby pelican and sting ray in the footage.”

 
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