California scientist and filmmaker spots an apparent dog, never before seen in the wild, in drone photos.
California researchers are also getting the first look at a stunning new baby white shark, which they captured in drone photos taken last summer.
The new baby animal has never before been seen in the wild. But in July, wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and Phillip Sternes, a biology PhD student at the University of California, Riverside, caught a glimpse of something surprising in the waters near Santa Barbara on California’s central coast.
Gauna’s drone camera captured what looked like a stunning white shark dog, about 5 feet long and naturally white, a rare coloration since sharks are white on the ground and gray on top.
Baby Shark Looks Stunning?
“We zoomed in on the footage, put it in slow motion, and found that the white coating was shedding from the body as it swam,” Sternes said in a university statement. “I think it was a newborn great white shark shedding its embryonic coating.”
Sternes and Gauna, who have filmed sharks around the world in YouTube videos that have millions of views, documented their findings in a paper published this week in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.
The authors proposed that the thin white membrane enveloping the shark could arise from skin problems, but they expressed their belief that it was a newborn great white shark. The creature was reported to be unusual because it was measuring as long as a freshly born shark, and the surface resembled that of a fetal-cycle embryo.
Gauna said he had previously found prime great white sharks in the area that appeared pregnant and that the baby shark emerged in the body in which dogs are born. In the university’s announcement, it described the find as “one of the holy grails of shark technology. The neonate sharks henceforward stay coincident with their respective mothers, but no one has been able to witness it.
They believe the animal they documented was days or hours old.
“There’s plenty of hypothetical ranges, but in all the years of work done with these sharks, no one has seen a birth or a pup out there in the wild,” Sternes states. “This may well be the first evidence we have of a domestic dog in the wild, making it a definitive birth site.”
Experts on the subject mostly praised the find in comments to CNN, calling the comment “hugely significant.”