When researchers from Massey University in New Zealand dropped a camera off their boat in the Southwest Pacific, they expected to get the usual footage. They got a lot more than that, though, when a 10-to-12 foot great white shark zipped in for a quick sniff.
“When the gear is on the seabed, we don’t have a live feed so we have no idea what we’re going to see when we review the footage at the end of the day,” explained Massey scientist Dr. Adam Smith. “The most common sharks were grey and whitetip reef sharks, but we also encountered tiger sharks, hammerheads, and some very obnoxious octopus.”
The team of researchers, including postgraduate student Odette Howarth, marine technician Emma Betty, and shark scientist Clinton Duffy was surprised when they pulled up the camera and checked the footage since great whites are relatively uncommon in the area. The region, known as Rangitāhua, lies about just over 600 miles northeast of New Zealand’s North Island. Using BRUV, or Baited Remote Underwater Video, they dropped two cameras and a chunk of bait attached to a steel frame down to the seafloor and left it there for an hour and a half.
“Getting the great white at the end of the trip was a definitely a highlight though, especially considering they’ve only been recorded at the Kermadecs a few times before,” Dr. Smith continued. “It’s likely that some great whites stopover while migrating between NZ and the tropics, like humpback whales do.”
Although they were pleased to get the incredible footage of the great white, what they found elsewhere was a little disturbing. “We were happy to see large numbers of sharks on some submerged banks in the tropics, and New Zealand’s Kermadec Islands,” Smith said, “but there were surprisingly few in many other locations, probably due to overfishing.”
