A nurse shark videographer — an actual wild shark with an attached GoPro — captured rare “shark’s eye view” footage of a great white shark photobombing its video.
While it’s common practice for scientists to use GPS tags to document wildlife movement, improving the understanding of how animals interact with the environment, scientists in Florida took this one step further. Florida Atlantic University is studying sharks with a novel idea, filming the animal’s movements using fin-mounted cameras. The results are a shark’s first-person view of wildlife behavior, delivering an astounding look into the lives of these fascinating creatures.
In a YouTube video released by the university, Dr. Stephen Kajiura, a professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) explained, “One of the things that we’ve started doing recently is instrumenting these sharks with these camera tags so we can get a shark’s-eye-view of what they’re doing as they’re swimming around doing their daily activities.”
In addition to allowing researchers to track the animals, these camera tags enable scientists to observe the animal’s behavior when not affected by the presence of humans, such as a dive team filming them.
This novel approach by FAU led to rare footage when a nurse shark equipped with a camera tag captured a shark’s eye view of its underwater encounter with a great white shark.
Nurse sharks average 7.5 to 9.8 feet (2.3 to three meters) long and weigh between 200 to 330 pounds (91-150 kilograms). While great white sharks are sexually dimorphic concerning their size, the larger females can be up to 16 feet (4.9 meters) long and weigh as much as 2,450 pounds (1,111 kilograms). The new video footage shows how these two shark species interact, especially when the nurse shark faces a much larger animal.
Genevieve Sylvester, a Marine Science and Oceanography student at FAU, is studying shark behavior and kinematics using the data from the camera tags.
“Kinematics is the study of basically how the shark moves. We study how the shark, basically the tail beat frequency of the shark, if the shark is foraging or feeding, how many tail beats is it doing and if its swimming with other sharks how fast or slow is it moving, things like that,” Sylvester says.
Using a lightweight custom rig created with a GoPro fitted onto buoyant syntactic foam, Sylvester attaches her camera tags to sharks on the South Florida coast with a temporary clamp. The tag is designed to fall off naturally; the waves and buoyant foam bring it back to shore, where the team can recover the device and its data.
While set up about a mile offshore from Boynton Beach Inlet at Donny Boy Slipe Reef, a popular dive site, the team fitted their device to this nurse shark, never expecting to capture a literal shark photobomb in action.
“The cool thing is, these two sharks interacted for about four minutes. It wasn’t just a one-off, they passed each other multiple times around this artificial reef. So I think this is probably one of the few times where a shark has captured a picture of another shark,” Dr. Kajiura adds.
FAU’s Science division applauded Sylvester’s novel approach, “Genevieve builds animal-borne logger cameras that help us better understand the swimming movements and behavior of sharks in the wild. Her research will provide news insights into a shark’s role within marine ecosystems and inform policies aimed at preserving sharks for future generations.”
FAU’s environmental programs and studies are regularly posted to its site, with ongoing cutting-edge research in marine conservation and preservation.
“Stay tuned. There is much more to come. This is just the beginning of an incredible journey into the underwater world of South Florida’s sharks,” Dr. Kajiura teases.
Image credits: Florida Atlantic University
