A group of kayakers had a close encounter with an aggressive hammerhead shark off the coast of San Diego during the weekend.
There were no injuries, but there probably were a few frayed nerves as the six-foot predator followed them back to shore.
ABC 10 News in San Diego reported that the incident prompted beach closures in La Jolla and that the sighting of a second, larger hammerhead prompted a warning to surfers to take a few days off.
A few weeks earlier, anglers fishing for yellowfin off Oceanside, Calif., met up with a big hammerhead shark.
While we’re on the subject of hammerheads, we found this video from Andy Casagrande in which he captured some incredible GoPro footage of a unique point of view from a hammerhead shark’s dorsal fin as it swims along the ocean floor.
Kim Holland, a shark researcher at the University of Hawaii, said attaching a camera to a shark for a short period of time is probably not harmful.
“It depends a lot on the duration of the attachment,” Holland told the Huffington Post. “If it’s short, it probably won’t harm the shark that much. On the other hand, if it’s a short-duration attachment, it will add nothing to the scientific understanding of hammerhead shark biology.”
Left unsaid was that doing what Casagrande did could shorten the lifespan of the person with the camera.
