Screenshot/Discovery
Within the 34 years since Shark Week first launched, the Discovery community has proven footage of sharks leaping, sharks combating, sharks migrating, sharks attacking, sharks being invented (bear in mind the Megalodon?), sharks racing Michael Phelps, sharks sparring with Mike Tyson, and sharks biting a solid member from Jackass.
Suffice it to say, it’s exceptional—after three many years and hundreds of hours of programming—for there to be one thing utterly new to point out viewers who're ravenous every summer time for shark content material.
Throughout Shark Week filming earlier this 12 months, a drone digicam captured footage of a pack of orca whales (killer whales) killing a terrific white shark. Nothing like this has been captured for Shark Week earlier than, and it's essential video proof to help scientists’ theories that nice whites are migrating—or relatively fleeing—from their standard habitats as a result of they're being hunted by orcas, a brand new phenomenon.
The gorgeous footage will debut on Thursday within the particular Shark Home, however you'll be able to see the unique clip right here on the Each day Beast under:
Alison Towner, a scientist based mostly in South Africa, has been finding out the motion ecology of nice white sharks for 15 years and has revealed a current paper on the orcas’ stunning predation of nice whites.
This footage, she reiterates a number of occasions as we communicate over the telephone, isn’t simply astonishing—it’s historic. “It is in all probability one of the crucial lovely items of pure historical past ever filmed.”
“I actually do assume as soon as that footage airs, it may go viral,” she tells the Each day Beast. “The entire world goes to enter a frenzy about it as a result of it is simply so distinctive.”
The clip exhibits three orcas in South Africa’s Mossel Bay, an space that had famously been an aggregation website for nice whites, however has seen them disappearing. The whale within the center involves the floor clenching a useless shark in its jaws. The good white is about nine-feet-long—“so not a tiny animal,” Towner quips—and the orca is biting it round its liver space. You start to see a considerable amount of blood pool across the two different whales whereas the unique dives again down into the water with it.
“We’ve had all of the proof for killer whales being liable for killing white sharks,” Towner says. Carcasses have washed up on the seaside with their livers lacking. Information revealing a change within the whales’ biking habits and revealing that the white sharks have fled the coasts the place they used to habituate, suggesting a correlation. “However that is the world's first drone footage of killer whales predating on a white shark. It is the primary time in South Africa it is ever been documented as direct proof.”
Towner’s article in the African Journal of Marine Science goes into extra depth about how these killer whales’ current predation is liable for nice whites fleeing the areas of South Africa the place they as soon as thrived.
Shark Home airs Thursday night time on Discovery and Discovery+. And in case you’d like to take a look at some extra nice Shark Week footage, try this clip under from Air Jaws: Prime Gun, a particular about high-flying sharks captured breaching with new state-of-the-art footage.