'People aren't food.' Footage shows shark circling swimmer at SoCal beach

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Set us as preferred A shark drone photographer captured extraordinary footage of a great white circling a swimmer off the coast of Santa Barbara.Carlos Gauna, who has been documenting sharks for roughly a decade, regularly posts such videos to his YouTube channel, TheMalibuArtist.His work has helped people learn that the apex predators are around humans more often than once thought.

The vast majority of those encounters are uneventful, with both humans and sharks continuing on their way.But a video Gauna shot on Sunday made him nervous.“Normally when I film the white sharks around humans, they will come up to a human, figure out it’s a human and then leave,” he said.In this case, the shark — which Gauna believes to be a roughly 9-foot juvenile — lingered within arm’s length of the swimmer, circling him several times.“This one took a little longer to figure out that this was not food, or that it was a human, and that kind of made me a little uncomfortable,” Gauna said.He theorized that was because the water was turbid and muddy due to big surf, which may make it harder for a shark to differentiate humans from prey.Gauna found the swimmer on the beach and showed him the footage, filming his reaction.The swimmer said he had felt something moving through the water but hadn’t seen the shark.

Still, the man told Gauna, “I think about the sharks, and I think if I do die this way, at least I’ll be in my happy place.”The swimmer did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.Like humans, sharks use a melody of senses to interpret the world around them, said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach.His team has recently been studying how hearing factors into this, and preliminary findings indicate that the sounds people make while swimming can make a shark more likely to approach ...