Too close. A little bit too close. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Great white sharks are a bit of a mystery to us. That’s strange, because generally when we become so morbidly fascinated with something, we’ve got a tendency to research it to death — sometimes quite literally. Shark researchers will be the first to tell you that there’s a ton we don’t know, and Carlos Gauna is one of them.
“Every summer, great white sharks return to the California coast,” he says, “and every year they remind me of just how much we don’t really understand about their behaviors.”
Despite our tendency to think of them as mindless killing machines, we really aren’t on their menu. They’re curious animals — apex predators that use curiosity to seek out more prey — and most of the time, attacks are either test bites or self-defense.
In the video you see here, Carlos Gauna tracks a couple of great white sharks as they follow a kayak fisherman.
“From above, I captured the entire encounter on drone,” Gauna wrote. “One shark made several close approaches to the kayak, while another seemed more interested in the larger shark than the fisherman himself. At one point, a third shark may have even joined in. This is one of the closest and most surprising kayak encounters with white sharks I’ve ever filmed.”