Unexpected shark behaviour: Rare footage
Marine scientists were amazed by their extremely rare sighting of a shark’s natural behaviour far off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.
Footage shows a two-metre male salmon shark heaving itself onto, and sliding along, a barnacle-encrusted log adrift at sea. Researchers believe the shark was attempting to remove the large, visible parasites from its body and fins, copepods that are detrimental to the shark’s health and swimming efficiency.
Related programs
Transcript
Tully bridge Tully 1 it’s about 5 feet in front of our bow.
It’s coming right for us now
Is it a salmon shark?
Yes!
So we got a 2 metre male salmon shark.
We were out there deploying a couple of gliders,
We noticed that it started brushing itself on this log over and over again
Woah, its right there right there!
It looked like it was aiming for these big clumps of barnacles
and then it would heave its body out of the water and actually slide it along.
That is so cool.
Well that’s where his parasites are, those are the tags.
It's really interesting that these logs out at sea
may be scratching posts for them to rid themselves of parasites.
We were observing an animal in the wild
doing what it naturally does,
and it didn't seem to be bothered by us at all.
As far as I know this footage doesn't exist elsewhere.
Thats incredible!
Shelton Dupreez, Fisheries and Oceans Canada
- Date modified: