Great White Shark Goes Airborne Off Orange County Coast: Watch

SUNSET BEACH, CA - A pair of surfers wearing a GoPro camera captured video of a 6-foot great white shark breaching the surface of the water in Sunset Beach Monday, shooting high into the air.

The sight was enough to send surfers Drew Palumbo and Ben Slayback packing.

“Both of us knew what we were seeing,” Palumbo told CBS. “Seeing them in this kind of manner … That was enough for us to say, ‘Maybe we’ll go somewhere else for the rest of the day.'”

The shark, an estimated 6 and a half feet, is a juvenile great white and a common site in the Surfside-Sunset Beach area over the last few years.

While full-grown sharks are known to breach while attacking prey, experts don’t really know why juveniles do it, Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach told The Orange County Register.

Lowe theorized they may be scratching their backs because of pesky water bugs called copepods.

“One of the thoughts is they might be irritating the sharks,” he told the newspaper.

Or maybe they are just playing, he added.

Lowe and his team of researchers have been tagging and tracking the sharks in an effort to understand their shifting patterns and behaviors. The unusually warm waters off the Southern California coast have attracted the great white sharks and kept them here during the winter when the juveniles typically head to the warmer waters off Mexico, Lowe told Patch.

It’s not uncommon to see juvenile great whites breaching off the local coastline.

Juveniles, like the one in Palumbo’s video, feed off fish and stingrays abundant in the area. The juvenile sharks tend to range in length from five to eight feet, and they usually steer clear of humans. It’s not until they are a little older, closer to 10-feet in length, that they become more of a threat to swimmers or surfers.

A 10-foot shark, typically three to five-years-old, is big enough to feed on an adult seal and will begin feeding on marine mammals, said Lowe. The bigger sharks typically head up the coast and further out to sea to feed on larger prey.

But with the warming of local waters, there has been an increase in shark sightings over the last year, with aggressive sharks forcing closures from Surfside to San Clemente. Last year, more than a dozen great whites were spotted lingering offshore in Surfside during Memorial Day weekend.

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