#Jason Bittel

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This Might Be The First Newborn Great White Shark Ever Recorded

The 5-foot great white was filmed off the coast of California covered in a strange, milky substance that could be uterine fluid.

— By Jason Bittel | January 29, 2024 | Photographs: By Carlos Gauna

Is this first-ever recorded sighting of a newborn great white shark? A milky white film—which scientists suggest could be a sort of uterine "milk"—flaked off the young shark's tail as it swam off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Photographs By Carlos Gauna

For as much time and money as people have spent studying and filming great white sharks, no one has ever witnessed one being born. But new footage out of California might be the next best thing.

On July 9, 2023, filmmaker Carlos Gauna and organismal biologist Phillip Sternes were following sharks with a drone off the coast of Santa Barbara. They’d already captured footage of a few larger great whites, but then something completely unexpected drifted up out of the murk.

“Toward the end of the day this peculiar-looking white shark appeared, and we were both super excited,” says Sternes, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside.

At just under five feet long with chubby, rounded fins, the duo knew they were looking at a very young great white. (For comparison, adult great whites can stretch up to 21 feet long.) But as the drone zoomed in, it caught something never seen before—a milky white film that appeared to flake off the young shark’s tail as it swam.

While no one can say for sure what the white material is, Sternes suggests it may be a sort of uterine “milk” used to nourish newborn sharks in the womb. Another possibility is that the shark has a skin condition that has never been described before.

“Both scenarios are highly significant,” says Sternes, who together with Gauna co-authored a study announcing the findings today in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.

“This is extremely rare. White shark birthing locations have remained extremely elusive for the scientific community,” Sternes tells National Geographic in an email. “We think we have a piece to the puzzle now. If this is a birthing location, conservation aspects must be considered.”

‘A Really Unique Observation’

To understand just how rare a sighting of a newborn great shark is, you need to first understand that we know surprisingly little about how the world’s largest predatory shark reproduces.

“I think it’s incredible,” says Greg Skomal, a shark biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries who was familiar with the footage but not involved with the new study. “People don't realize that some of the most basic questions about white shark reproduction are unanswered.”

Skomal cautioned against making any major conclusions based on the footage, however.

“It’s like any observation. You only have so much information, right? You have the imagery. You got the date, the time, the location. And the rest is speculation,” says Skomal, who is also author of Chasing Shadows: My Life Tracking the Great White Shark.

That said, Skomal did acknowledge that the facts presented would seem to point toward the shark being a newborn.

Scientists know surprisingly little about the reproduction of great white sharks—so the discovery of a birthing site would go a long way to advancing our understanding of these animals. Photographs By Carlos Gauna

For instance, the area where it was spotted has been thought to be a great white nursery, as first-year sharks have been documented there before. And Skomal says the shark’s coloration, shape, size, as well as the appearance of the milky white fluid all suggest it’s extremely young.

“That’s led researchers to think it’s a newborn white shark, and it probably is,” says Skomal. “The question is, when was it born? Is it hours, or days [old]? We don’t know that.”

What This Means For Research

National Geographic Explorer Gibbs Kuguru, a scientist who studies the DNA of sharks, says that the sighting is “a game-changer”—particularly if the white fluid is what researchers suspect it is.

“The fact that we have a shark in the process of shedding its “amniotic fluid” is compelling evidence that we're looking at a newborn, which is critical because it strongly suggests the shark hasn’t strayed far from its birth site,” he says. “Also, considering the decades of research about finding the elusive mating and birthing locations of Great Whites, stumbling upon a potential pupping ground like this is nothing short of radical.”

Because ocean animals spend the majority of their lives below the water’s surface, sometimes discoveries must wait until scientists happen to be in the right place at the right time. That was certainly the case when scientists witnessed a humpback giving birth for the first time in March 2021.

“We very rarely ever get to see a live newborn white shark, which could have been born within hours,” says Skomal. “And if that’s the case, this is a really unique observation.”

Great white sharks are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with the overall population thought to be decreasing. Learning more about where they start their lives would be critical information for scientists seeking to safeguard the future of the species.

As for Sternes, he says, “I look forward to receiving feedback from the scientific community.”

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Antonio Velardo shares: These Tiny, Beautiful Wasps Eat the Hearts Out of Cockroaches by Jason Bittel

By Jason Bittel Jewel wasps carve up cockroaches like jack-o’-lanterns in a way scientists have never seen before. Published: October 29, 2023 at 05:02AM from NYT Science https://ift.tt/NVlLvSo via IFTTT

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"A Giant Stingray May Be the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/science/giant-stingray-mekong.html?partner=IFTTT

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"La vida sexual de las cucarachas se ha puesto extraña" by BY JASON BITTEL via NYT en Español https://ift.tt/AMCeL1r

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://ift.tt/yOV82si

[xtruss]

Even as a drone hovered above to get this shot, a large male polar bear that photographer Martin Gregus, Jr., calls Scar never stirred in this bed of fireweed. Gregus says he named many of the bears in hopes it would help people relate to them as individuals needing protection.

Snoozing in Flower Beds? Behold the Bears of Summer

A photographer spends two months in the Canadian Arctic and reveals a softer side of the world’s largest terrestrial predator.

— By Jason Bittel | Photographs By Martin Gregus, Jr. | Published August 9, 2022

“You always see polar bears on ice and snow,” says photographer Martin Gregus, Jr. “But it’s not like they stop living in the summertime.” Determined to reveal this less depicted angle on the bears, he constructed a field station on the back of a small boat and spent 33 days north of Churchill, Manitoba, in the summers of 2020 and 2021.

The bears that Gregus calls Betty and Veronica wrestled over this boulder for nearly an hour before he caught them forming the shape of a heart. The two seemed inseparable, often playing and hunting together.

Two large cubs appear to guard their mother while a male passes by, just out of the frame. For Gregus, the image recalls Cerberus, the multiheaded dog of Greek mythology.

Aurora and her cub, Beans, hunker down as a storm approaches. Thunder and lightning have recently become more frequent in this region as a result of climate change, Gregus says. Every time the sky cracked, the bears started shaking, like dogs hearing fireworks.

Polar bears spend so much time in the water that many scientists consider them to be marine mammals. In some cases, they’ve been recorded swimming for more than a week straight and clocking over 400 miles. To get underwater images like this one of a polar bear moving from melting sea ice onto dry land, Gregus developed camera rigs and techniques that allowed him to get close to the animals without being seen by them.

The more Gregus studied the bears, the more he learned of their personalities. There was the persistent cub he named Hercules. He lost a leg yet managed to survive his first two summers. An enormous female, Wanda, seemed to be feared by other bears but spent her days doing yoga-like stretches in the fireweed. Another female, Wilma, appeared to be so comfortable with Gregus that she’d nurse her cubs, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, close enough for him to hear their purring. Gregus also witnessed behaviors he’d rarely seen before, such as bears grazing on plants and hunting tern chicks by chasing them into the surf. For now, actions like those may be helping this polar bear population cope with the effects of climate change—but others elsewhere are starving.

“All of these pictures show bears that are fat, healthy, and playful,” Gregus says. So although from a global perspective everything may be going wrong for polar bears, “obviously something’s going right here.”

“We’d look around and say, ‘Where’s Wanda?’ Because if she was there, we didn’t have to worry about any other bears,” says Gregus, of the large but laid-back female.

Cubs weigh just one pound at birth, but a diet of milk that is extremely rich in fat helps them bulk up quickly. Each cub will nurse for at least 20 months, and they usually stay by their mother’s side for two years.

In this part of the Arctic, everything’s flat, Gregus says. That means even a small boulder can provide a better view—if a bear hasn’t succumbed to sleep, that is. The bears, including Veronica (shown), often stood on this rock, scouring the area for seals to eat or bears to avoid. Gregus hopes to return to this coast, where he sees the bears “thriving and adapting to the environment.” But he knows that in most of their range, polar bears are suffering from the warming temperatures.

[electronicstarfishanchor2322]

Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn

By Jason Bittel In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects. Published: May 26, 2022 at 05:00PM from Science via New York TimesNYT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn

By Jason Bittel In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects. Published: May 26, 2022 at 03:00PM from NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT via IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT

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"Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn" by Jason Bittel via NYT Science https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/science/cockroach-sugar-sex.html?partner=IFTTT