Great white sharks videotaped attacking plastic seal

By Pete Thomas/GrindTv

Mark van Coller recently spent several weeks False Bay, South Africa, keeping his camera trained on a seal decoy being towed behind a shark-diving boat.

His stunning footage will give viewers a taste of what it’s like to be a real seal in this region (a horrifying thought), where great white sharks are known to savagely ambush their prey while launching free of the water.

Van Coller told the Daily Mail, “We filmed just before and just after sunrise, as this is the most active time for the sharks to hunt.

“During this time the seals and our seal decoy form a good silhouette for the sharks to target, but the water is still very dark, making it very difficult for the seals to spot the predators. This gives the sharks a big advantage during these hours.”

While capturing this type of footage might seem easy, one never knows when the plastic seal might be hit, and the ferocious assaults occur suddenly and last only a second or two, adding to the challenge.

Said Van Coller, who is South African: “There have been occasions when the boat has pulled the decoy for close to an hour with no breaches. But you dare not take you eye off the viewfinder and the decoy because that is always when it happens. You turn around to say something to someone and smash, you miss it.”

The videographer, who was working for Atlantic Edge Films, doesn’t appear to have missed much.

Comments

[drudown]

Is it me or do many of the White sharks now "flush" their mouths with seawater once the decoy is tasted? Some even look visibly annoyed with the, ahem, "bait and switch," i.e., suggesting higher cognition for these semi-warm-blooded fish. They learn quick but cannot resist the temptation of an isolated seal. It is probably such a strongly ingrained instinctual habit so closely tied to their survival, not unlike a lioness in the zoo grunting upon hearing a human mew like a lion cub. Instinct overrides legal impossibility.