The beauty of technology is that it allows moments to be captured exactly. In the Philippines, photographer Attila Bicskos Kaszo was able to immortalize a remarkable event: a thresher shark giving birth.
The birth was observed in a "cleaning station" in the Philippines where pelagic thresher sharks have been converging in the last 20 years. The cleaning station, aptly called because it's where sharks come to be cleaned by cleaner wrasse, is located in a coastal seamount or underwater mountain. It's very rare to see a shark about to give birth in the wild, so Kaszo didn't consider the possibility that he had just captured something of significance. In fact, he had already discarded the photograph.
"That picture ended up in my trash folder because it appeared to have a 'blob' on it, which I thought was a jellyfish. As it was I didn't have a good profile shot so I revisited my trash folder and looked more closely at what I had. Even after I had stared at it for some time I couldn't reconcile it was a birth, I guess it was just too far-fetched for that," recounted Kaszo.
Dr. Simon Thorrold, a senior scientist at Massachusetts' Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, referred to the photograph as amazing, saying he has never seen anything like it, perfectly capturing a pelagic shark. While not entirely definitive, Thorrold went on to say that the photograph might as well be the first time that the event was captured.
Dr. Simon Oliver, one of Kaszo's companions when the picture was taken, said that seeing the photograph was one of the most exciting times of his career. He never did expect they would be able to capture the moment, after all, since they were simply doing a standard survey. When Kaszo showed him the photograph, he freaked out.
"We observed the shark for a total of four minutes, during which we took its photograph for identification purposes. The shark then left the cleaning station and was not observed again. Later, when we processed the photograph for analysis, it revealed the head of a pup emerging from the shark's cloaca," wrote Oliver and Kaszo of their experience, published in the journal Coral Reefs.
"We've seen lots of [pregnant] females there, so I don't think this is a one-off. It looks like this area is not just a cleaning station, which is already massively essential; it's also serving as a pupping ground," said Oliver of the cleaning station.
