We are back today with a series of underwater photos of SHARKS taken by Peter Klaver. Peter’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
During scuba diving off Bimini, Bahamas my scuba diving buddies and I went on two hammerhead shark feeding dives. The waters around Bimini are home to the Great hammerhead, Sphyrna mokarran, that typically grows to over 4m and over 400 kg. We saw several smaller ones and a large female that one of our dive guides said was ~14 feet long.
While the shark feed dives are not a very natural setting, such objections quickly disappeared from my mind as I saw a nearly half metric ton shark sometimes pass by less than 1 foot away from me. Below are some video frames, with a few divers (further away from the camera than the shark admittedly, making the shark look bigger) included in the last frame for size.
I was planning to send in some shark photos too – just hang on, let me learn how to swim and dive scuba, learn how to take photos underwater, learn boating, get a boat, learn how to be unappetizing to sharks,…
😆
Awesome animals, awesome photos, awesome adventure!
Wow!
Cool pictures!
What an animal! Thank you.
That is awesome!! I would be terrified, even though my higher cognitive centers would be assuring me that this species isn’t that aggressive under these circumstances.
According to all-knowing Google AI, hammerhead sharks first appeared only about 20 million years ago. I wonder why the hammerhead feature didn’t evolve earlier and why more families of sharks didn’t evolve that way.
Wow! Cool photos!
That’s real bravery! Great photos. What are the poles in front of each diver in the last picture? Something for the divers to hold onto so that they don’t accidentally drift into the feeding zone?
They are plastic pipes that we were told to stick up if the sharks ever came too close for comfort. Sticking out the pipes is supposed to make the sharks veer off. But few of our group ever felt the need to stick up their pipes. The hammerheads seemed very used to the routine in which they get chunks of fish from the feeder and then swim by the row of divers lined up in the sand. I never felt any worry about the hammerheads.
On anorther dive we had two tiger sharks at the feed, in addition to a number of hammerheads. Tiger sharks are a different matter. Once every ~5-10 years there is a report of a deadly biting incident in the Bahamas involving a tiger shark. Not during shark feed sessions, but when divers are floating on the surface after the dive, or are climbing back on their vessels and the lower half of their body is still dangling in the water. That can be an inviting sight for a tiger shark.
Thank you very much for the additional information. I admire you greatly for taking this risk. What a great experience!
This was in my backlog, but I just had to add that these are amazing. My sister is just back from the Maldives and had a trip to feed sharks. She also took photographs of amazing fish, including a stingray, through a window in her bungalow floor, she isn’t the greatest photographer, and hers aren’t a patch on these, so I won’t send then to you.