The first-ever footage of a boat-strike on a basking shark shows what happens in the hours afterwards. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Boat strikes can be devastating to all manner of sea life. Whales, for example, are often identified by scars caused by ship propellors, but it’s tough to tell how, exactly, those injuries affect whatever poor thing was hit. And for the first time ever, researchers have recorded video of a basking shark being struck by a boat.
According to a study released Frontiers in Marine Science, this is the first footage of any large marine animal being hit by a boat. It happened off the coast of Ireland, near County Kerry, about six hours after the authors of the study had outfitted the 23-foot basking shark with a camera.
The camera was situated just behind the dorsal fin of the shark and was supposed to fall off on its own after a period of time — a common practice for researchers using cameras on animals at sea — so when they retrieved the camera, they watched as the shark did normal shark things, like feeding near the surface in shallow waters. Suddenly, though, the shark made a drastic evasive movement.
“Within a second, a large boat keel cut across the back of the shark, just behind the dorsal fin, and the shark was tumbled through the water,” the authors of the study wrote. Immediately after the strike, the shark dove to the sea floor in what was likely an attempt to hide.
The accident, luckily, didn’t appear to deeply cut the shark. It did leave paint and a large abrasion on its back, but even without any blood spilled, the shark’s activity was markedly different. For the next 8 hours of the recording, the shark stayed in deeper water, not returning to the surface to resume feeding.
It’s the first time researchers have had a look at what an animal does after a boat strike, and it’s likely not all that surprising. Still, though, it’s a stark reminder that we’re not the only ones in the ocean and that the way we move through the world has very real effects on the animals we share it with.
