A newly released video has surfaced showing what may be the largest shark ever filmed.
The great white shark, nicknamed “Deep Blue” and featured in Discovery Channel’s Shark Week programming last year, is estimated to be 20 feet long and weighs around 5,000 pounds, according to Mauricio Hoyos Padilla, who shot the footage and is the director of the non-profit organization Pelagios Kakunjá.
Padilla said that the video was shot in 2013, but that he only just found it on his computer. He shared it via Facebook on Monday.
On his Facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/amaukua?fref=ts&ref=br_tf he wrote, “Just to let you know, the out of the cage is forbidden (now). No one is allowed to do it. It is in the good practices manual. This happened in the past.”
On that day two years ago, Padilla and his team encountered the shark near Guadalupe Island near Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. In the earlier footage (see link below), Deep Blue even appears to high five the diver!
Because of Deep Blue’s size, body shape and the location where the shark was filmed, Padilla and other experts think that the enormous predator was pregnant at the time.
Other pregnant great whites have been spotted at the same region, where they feast on protein-packed seals.
“When I saw Deep Blue for the first time, there was just one thought in my mind: hope,” Padilla wrote on a slideshare.net page. “A shark of that size is at least 50 years old, and that tells me protection and conservation efforts are really working.”
He continued, “Deep Blue has been spared from long-lines (used by fisheries) and the inherent dangers of being in the wild, and somehow she has found her way in the vast ocean.”
Deep Blue’s fate is unknown, however.
When great whites are about to give birth, Padilla said that they go closer to shore to be even nearer to food and away from possible shark pup predators like other sharks. These locations put them at greater risk for human threats.
Pelagios Kakunjá is collecting donations to help fund shark tagging, to better define great white nursery grounds “in order to give the Mexican government the tools to protect them.”
Source:http://news.discovery.com/animals/sharks/video-shows-largest-shark-ever-filmed-150812.htm