Do you ever think about what it would like to be eaten by a shark? Those razor sharp teeth, those dead, soulless eyes, that machine-like thrashing designed by millions of years of evolution to tear you limb from limb? Do you worry about your skinny little legs, dangling deliciously off your surfboard like soggy little drumsticks, like rubber-encased morsels of tender flesh, providing a temptation too great for that mindless killing machine lurking just beneath the surface? Well, you shouldn’t, because that’s just the movie Jaws talking. You shouldn’t because you’re not going to get bitten by a shark unless you’re very, very unlucky. Time Magazine, in fact, found that you’re more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a shark, a prospect that is far more terrifying because that means if you’re surfing with Balaram Stack, you’re going to get eaten.
Still, though, great white sharks ARE terrifying, especially giant ones, like many of the ones found off Isla Guadalupe. Growing longer than 20 feet and weighing more than 5,000 pounds, the largest great whites are often seen as nothing more than massive meat tubes with 300 serrated teeth that are designed to tear your flesh from your bones instead of the incredibly important balance keepers of the ocean. But oh shit, it would suck to be eaten by one! Lucky for you, you get to see what it’s like inside the shark’s mouth without actually having to be inside the shark’s mouth, thanks to Dominik Fretz, a software developer and explorer for National Geographic, and an underwater camera drone called a Trident.
“The sharks were very curious about the ROV,” Fretz said on a Nat Geo blog post. “In fact, one of them got so curious that it tried to bite Trident. Apparently, though, Tridents aren’t tasty for sharks and it got spat out again right away. Trident was fine, except for a couple of bite marks on the bumpers. The tether wasn’t cut, how, I don’t know. The shark was fine too, it went about its business and kept coming back a few times.”
