The National Geographic Channel recently produced the television documentary “Great White Odyssey”, and choose one of my great white shark photos (Carcharodon carcharias) to use as the main background to the web page publicizing the program. Here is a link to NG Channel’s page for the Great White Odyssey. The original image was made in September 2008 at Guadalupe Island, Mexico aboard my favorite dive and adventure boat, the Horizon out of San Diego.
I was fortunate to have another credit for the National Geographic Society (in the magazine) recently.
Background image by Phillip Colla, great white shark at Guadalupe Island, Mexico
This great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) was photographed at Guadalupe Island, Mexico. I think I have made about 15 trips to the island, a mix of open-water diving trips and shark cage photography trips. I am hoping to get down there again for scuba diving, freediving and just plain exploration (no sharking or cages) with Skip in Summer 2010. More details about Skip’s return trip to the island will be sent out soon to those who have accompanied Skip and me on past trips to Guadalupe and elsewhere. See some past blog posts about Guadalupe Island if you are interested in the island.
More photos of great white sharks, Guadalupe Island photos.
This is one of my favorites from this year’s trip on the M/V Horizon to photograph great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) at Guadalupe Island.
Shark Diving resources: Horizon Charters and SharkDiver.com. Also, be sure to check out our hundreds of additional Guadalupe Island photos and photos of great white sharks.
Here is the face of a great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). Check out the detail in the shark’s eye, he is looking straight back into the camera. This was shot with a 24mm lens, full frame sensor, no crop. Pretty tight.
Shark Diving resources: Horizon Charters and SharkDiver.com.
Be sure to check out our hundreds of additional Guadalupe Island photos and photos of great white sharks.
Many of the great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) at Guadalupe Island are known to researchers and appear in the white shark ID database. Some of the sharks have even been “tagged” and now sport small pop-up satellite transmitter tags that collect data about the shark’s environment and behavior, eventually transmitting the data via satellite back to researchers. Shown below are a pair of satellite tags, located just below the dorsal fin of a great white shark:
Shark Diving resources: Horizon Charters and SharkDiver.com.
Be sure to check out our hundreds of additional Guadalupe Island photos and great white shark photos.
When a Guadalupe Island great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) first approaches the boat, it is often deep. If there are divers in the cage they typically get a look at the shark as it swims slowly beneath the boat. It seems the shark is surveying things before making a decision to move shallower and approach the boat and cages more closely. Occasionally a shark rises from the deep suddenly, straight up, leveling out only when it reaches or breaks the surface. That’s what this male white shark did. (You can tell he is a male by his two claspers visible on his ventral surface.)
Shark Diving resources: Horizon Charters and SharkDiver.com.
Be sure to check out our hundreds of additional Guadalupe Island photos and photos of great white sharks.
Each day on a Horizon Charters great white shark trip to Guadalupe Island starts with the crew lowering the huge aluminum cages into the water as guests enjoy breakfast and the morning calm. Often a shark will show up circling the boat and inspecting the cages before any divers have even had a chance to enter the water. Check out how flat the water is in these photos. The shark diving location, near the lighthouse in a broad protected bight at the north end of the island, is typically flat calm and sunny with blue water.
Shark Diving resources: Horizon Charters and SharkDiver.com.
Be sure to check out our hundreds of additional Guadalupe Island photos and great white shark photos.
This great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) had a particularly pointy look to him, really streamlined and sleek, with little beady black eyes. When you see a white shark in person its no wonder they are known as white pointers down under.
More photos of great white sharks, Guadalupe Island photos.
This is my favorite shot from my Shark Diver trip last week on the liveaboard boat Horizon to see great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) at Guadalupe Island. One shark in particular took to circling the boat clockwise and would pass very close to the starboard side cage. As it did so, I managed to get some close photographs with good detail of its eye, gills and the ampullae of Lorenzini on its snout.
Here are all of the photos from the trip.
See also: great white shark photos, Guadalupe Island, Isla Guadalupe, Carcharodon carcharias photos.
I was pretty lucky to get this photo. This is a great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) that I photographed at Guadalupe Island while I was on a Shark Diver trip last week on the liveaboard boat Horizon. This one, a medium size (e.g, 12-13′) male, surprised us all. We were cooling our heels in the cage during a five minute lull, a rarity on this trip as virtually every minute we had at least one shark visible underwater. I happened to be staring off the port stern corner of the boat when suddenly this shark came streaking in from the edge of the visibility, took a huge bite at the bait and missed. I have never seen a shark swim so fast in my life. What motivated him to approach like that was a mystery. Typically the sharks at Guadalupe swim rather slowly around the boat, accelerating only with two or three final thrusts of their tails to take the bait. But this guy was going full steam the entire time, even as he disappeared into the gloom on the starboard side of the boat. His momentum carried him in front of the cage with his mouth still agape, which was awefully impressive. When I returned onto the deck later, the crew even commented how they were caught offguard by his rocket approach and how he left a pressure wave on the surface as he pumped his tail below. That such a large creature could move through the water with such speed was a real eye opener for me.
See also: great white shark photos, Guadalupe Island, Isla Guadalupe, Carcharodon carcharias photos.
This is “Shredder”, aka “Scar”, a great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) often seen at Guadalupe Island. In 2003 Shredder bit the anchor line of the Ocean Odyssey clean through, severing the boat from its anchor. He is named for his shredded dorsal fin. Shredder is about 13-14 feet long. Note that in this photograph he is sporting three satellite tags on his left flank just below his dorsal fin. They are covered with algae but are probably still operational. These tags collect information about his diving habits and water temperature and transmit this information to a satellite for use by researchers.
See more photos of great white sharks.
Just back from a quick trip to Guadalupe Island to photograph great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). I had heard that this season has been a particularly good one for white sharks at Guadalupe, and I managed to get a few days off to get down there for a look on my favorite dive boat, the Horizon out of San Diego. (Patric Douglas at Shark Diver runs a series of trips each fall aboard the Horizon to see white sharks at Guadalupe.) Guadalupe is my favorite island, I love the place. I think I have made 15 trips to the island now, most for diving but at least five for white shark photography. I am always looking for an excuse to visit Isla Guadalupe as it never fails to offer up something extraordinary. This time was no exception. During three days at the island and about 18 hours in the cage, I saw probably 15 different white sharks ranging from about 8 feet to 13 feet or more in length, a mix of males and females, some I had seen and photographed before and some that were new to me and perhaps new to the white shark photo identification project. We’ll see on the latter once I submit the images to the researchers. We had only about one hour total where there were no sharks around the boat. We often had two at the boat, and on a few occasions had four within sight at once and six at the boat during a dive. There are a lot of white sharks at the north end of the island right now and from the sounds of it there have been for at least a month. It will take me a few weeks to sort through the 1700+ photos that I shot, select the keepers and get them processed for the web. Since I was using a new camera housing and lens, I was not entirely certain of how sharp the combo was so I pulled a few shots up on the computer between dives on the first day to check sharpness and exposure. Here is one:
See more great white shark photos.
I had an interesting conversation with Nicole Nasby Lucas of the Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research yesterday. Ms. Lucas and PIER co-founder Michael Domeier PhD have been conducting a capture/recapture study on great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) at Guadalupe Island, Mexico, building a database of identification photos and video of white sharks that inhabit the island. To date PIER has 73 individual sharks in their database, and the count increases each season. PIER also places a small number of satellite tags on Guadalupe white sharks to learn where they are going once they leave the island. Interestingly, some of the sharks tagged at Guadalupe Island swim all the way to the Hawaiian islands, including two of the sharks tagged during the most recent season. By observing the white sharks in this way, the PIER researchers are able to collect evidence about how the sharks utilize the island habitat and their migrations to and from the island.
I have had the good fortune of naming five of the PIER sharks by virtue of being the first photographer to capture each of them on film. The three females are named after my two daughters and my mother (you don’t think I am stupid enough to name one after my wife do you?). The two males are named after the notorious bachelors on Sex in the City: Big and The Russian.
In this case Ms. Lucas was able to link the right side and left side photographs by finding a common element between them: a notched tip on the left side ventral fin. Here she is, Guadalupe Island great white shark #57, “Leslie”:
For more information about PIER’s white shark research at Guadalupe Island, how the identification process works and what scientific publications have resulted from the study, visit the PIER website and see the online catalog.
Keywords: great white shark photos, Carcharodon carcharias photos, Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research
One great white shark photo on our website that is viewed more than almost all others is this one:
It appears that the great white shark in this photo is smiling at the cameraman, or is perhaps preparing to chomp the guy. In fact, this great white shark had just taken a mouthful of bait and was opening and closing its mouth in order to free bits of the bait from its teeth or gill slits. The exposure was made just as the shark happened to have both an open mouth and a gaze directed at the divers in the cage. Isla Guadalupe, Mexico.
Keywords: great white shark photo, Carcharodon carcharias, Guadalupe Island.
In the world of wildlife study, in which efforts are made to identify and track individual animals over time, researchers can fall prey to the temptation to name their subjects. There is considerable debate about the merits of this, as some scientists feel that assigning names to the animal subjects of a study causes the researchers to lose a certain amount of objectivity in the course of their observations. We have had the good luck of working with humpback whale researcher Dan R. Salden for a number of years, and observed that he made sure to always identify “his” humpbacks with an ID number rather than a descriptive name in an effort to avoid developing an attachment to them. However, it is unavoidable that over many years of work some individual animals receive a nickname in addition to their simple ID number. In the case of Dr. Salden’s whales, one such animal was “Mr. November” who had 30 days of fame when a photograph of his fluke appeared on the November page of a wall calendar.
We have been allowed to name five research subjects. It turns out that in some research efforts, the “right” to name an animal subject is given to the first person to photograph or videotape the animal. In this case, the animals happen to be great white sharks which I photographed and videotaped at Guadalupe Island. Three of them are females, big and beautiful sharks two of which are now named for my daughters who are happy to have the distinction of being the only students at school after whom killers have been named (the other female is named for my mother!). The remaining two are males, real brutes and good looking to boot, whom we decided to name for two notable lotharios of Sex in the City fame: Big and The Russian.
