Dale Pearson from the town of Puertecitos in Baja California, Mexico, got the shock of his life last month when he went to go help a struggling sea creature in shallow waters.
He thought it would be a beached whale or struggling hammerhead shark but instead it was a great white shark.
“It would come in to the shallows and lay there motionless, then it would move out again [swimming to] six feet of water, circle back in [to the shallows], come into another spot and lay there motionless,” Pearson said to The Huffington Post.
Pearson made a video on his camera phone of the 14 feet long shark, which was thrashing about in 3 feet of water. He posted it to his company’s Facebook page, Pearson Brothers Winery, where the expletive-filled video went viral.
The video shows the shark to have a large open wound just behind its dorsal fin. Pearson explains in the video that the wound likely was caused by a strike from a boat propeller.
Officials at the Marine Conservation Science Institute shared it on their Facebook page as well, explaining that “the injuries from the boat propeller would likely not kill the shark.”
“They are exceptionally tough with incredible healing ability,” the institute wrote on Facebook.
Pearson guessed that the shark ventured into shallow waters to hunt for stingrays.
“White sharks are generalists (and scavengers) when it comes to diet,” Mark Domeier, marine biologist and president of the institute, wrote on Facebook in agreement. “In other words they will eat whatever they want at that moment!”
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