16-04-2025
Photobomb! Nurse shark equipped with FAU camera films great white shark off South Florida
Photobombers are just about everywhere: in big cities, at family parties, and even in the ocean.
A 10-foot-long great white shark image was captured by a nurse shark that Florida Atlantic University researchers had equipped with a camera. The sharks were swimming around the Donnyboy Silpe Reef, an artificial reef off Boynton Beach.
Researchers placed a camera on a nurse shark designed to collect both video footage and 3D acceleration data, which is comparable to step-counting features in mobile devices. The camera caught a four-minute interaction between the great white shark and nurse shark filming it.
'While divers have reported seeing great white sharks here recently, this rare footage gives us a shark's-eye view of the interactions between these two very different kinds of sharks,' FAU biological studies professor Stephen Kajiura said in a university news release. 'Our footage clearly showed a great white, estimated to be at least 10 feet long, and reveals a rare moment of shark-on-shark action — or what we're coining as a 'shark photobomb.' '
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Yes, North Atlantic great white sharks leave their summer feeding grounds off Atlantic Canada and New England. Once they leave their feeding grounds, they head for warmer waters and abundant food sources as far south as Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, which the Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of America.
Can't get enough of great white sharks? You can check out Ocearch, which has tagged 125 white sharks, many of them along the Eastern Seaboard and Nova Scotia. Every so often, you'll see one of them ping along the Treasure Coast.
Follow their journeys on the Ocearch shark tracker website or by downloading the Ocearch Global Shark Tracker app.
Here are some recent visits to the Treasure Coast:
Contender: The biggest male great white shark ever tagged by Ocearch pinged off the Indian River County coast, northeast of Vero Beach at 10:09 a.m. Feb. 24. Contender is a 13-foot, 9-inch shark.
Danny: A 9-foot-long great white shark pinged off the Jupiter Island coast twice on Feb. 2, at 5:30 a.m. and 6:09 a.m.
Kim Luciani and Ashely Ferrer contributed to this article.
Gianna Montesano is TCPalm's trending reporter. You can contact her at 772-409-1429, or follow her on Twitter @gonthescene.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Great white shark caught on camera by nurse shark off Boynton Beach
