Shark-Cams Reveal the Secret Lives of Young Great White Sharks
A Great White Shark’s View of Life Beneath the Surface
What does a great white shark really get up to when no one is watching?
Scientists in Australia have been finding out by fitting juvenile great white sharks with cameras that provide a fascinating shark’s-eye view of life beneath the surface.
Researchers deployed camera and accelerometer packages on 13 juvenile white sharks along the coast of New South Wales, collecting 68.5 hours of usable footage. The results revealed some surprising behaviour.
Where Great White Sharks Spend Their Time
Rather than constantly hunting through open water, the sharks spent much of their time close to the seabed, with sandy habitats particularly favoured. Across the footage, researchers recorded 85 encounters with potential prey, including rays, marlin, moray eels, octopus, dolphins, other sharks and even an oarfish.
Despite plenty of opportunities, predatory behaviour was surprisingly rare. Just 20 bursts of high-speed activity were recorded, accounting for only 0.12% of the observation time, and none resulted in a successful capture.
In one particularly intriguing encounter, a young great white circled an oarfish three times without attempting to eat it. Other sharks made ascents of up to around 70–80 metres to investigate a hammerhead and another white shark before returning to the seabed.
Researchers believe the findings suggest juvenile white sharks are selective about the prey they pursue, with visual assessment potentially playing an important role in deciding whether something is worth chasing.
The study also highlights the value of animal-mounted cameras, allowing scientists to observe behaviour that would be almost impossible to witness from boats, drones or conventional tracking equipment.
A) Location of B) deployment of animal-borne cameras packages on white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) on the east coast of Australia. The green-shaded area is the study area; the numbers represent the number of animal-borne cameras deployed at that location
The research, A white shark’s view: insights into the behaviour of a marine predator, was published in Frontiers in Marine Science in July 2026.
Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2026.1799550/full
