Off the Bahamas, Brendan Talwar and his research team were conducting their regular study of threatened oceanic whitetip sharks when they noticed a pair of sharks courting each other.
As fast as they could manage, team members jumped in the water to capture the courtship on video. According to Talwar, a postdoctoral scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, the male shark followed the female shark so closely he was, “mirroring every tail beat.”
The video is the first to capture the mating ritual known as “circle-back.” When successful, the male shark will sink his teeth into the female’s flanks so they can mate.
Oceanic whitetip sharks are highly desirable for shark fin soup and scientists believe them to be vulnerable to extinction. The research team has been trying to answer why oceanic whitetip sharks seem to collect off Cat Island in the Bahamas. Some scientists believe they prefer to mate there in summer, but until now they did not know where they mated, so capturing the video of the sharks was a truly remarkable feat.
“It’s rare that people see that happen in any kind of shark, but especially the ones that live far offshore that have gone through these big population declines,” Talwar said.
