Fisherman witnesses rare sight of great white sharks mating
Wednesday, 9 September 2020
A fisherman’s description of stumbling across the rare sight of two great white sharks mating off the coast of Dunedin is one of only two accounts ever documented.
“And a lot of people didn’t believe us. But there it was,'' retired fisherman Dick Ledgerwood said.
His extraordinary account of the sex act emerged during a recently published 2016 interview with Canadian marine biologist Steve Crawford, who was researching great whites in New Zealand.
Ledgerwood, who spent more than four decades as a fisherman in New Zealand's southern waters, described what he saw in Otago Harbour in 1997.
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He was taking a vessel to Port Chalmers when his friend spotted something white in the waters.
‘’We turned around, and came back, had a look,’' Ledgerwood said.
The large boat got to within 10 metres of a pair of great whites.
”We just drifted up, and they didn't worry. I mean you wouldn't, would you?”
Ledgerwood said the sharks were in shallow waters about 4m deep. They were attached together, “and just revolving in slow circles”.
'’Just moving in one spot. Rolling and rolling and rolling.'’
Wedged close together, the sharks were ‘’just revolving round and round, very, very slowly’’.
He said the sharks were on a sandy floor of the harbour and did not react to the observers.
’’They just carried on with what they were doing.’’
They watched the sharks, which he estimated to be 4m long, for five minutes, before leaving.
'’We didn’t even blow the whistle,'' Ledgerwood said of the encounter.
New Zealand Department of Conservation’s shark expert Clinton Duffy told Stuff that Ledgerwood’s account was ‘’quite credible’'.
'’It is very detailed, and it fits in with what we know how other species of sharks mate. But there is no way of verifying it.'’
Many species of sharks were known to return to their place of birth, but where they mated remained a mystery.
’’No scientist has ever witnessed mating between great whites,” Duffy said.
He was aware of only one other reported account of sex between great whites, which also happened to be in the lower south, at Nugget Point, in 1991.
Great whites were known to aggregate in southern waters to feed on the large numbers of seals in the area.
Perhaps the biggest surprise from Ledgerwood’s account was how shallow the water was, possibly due to sharks being negatively buoyant meaning they would sink to the bottom as they mated.
But due to the sand on the bottom, Ledgerwood did not observe any clamping, when the sharks would bite each other during sex.
The southern waters of New Zealand attracted mainly smaller male sharks, with sexually mature females almost twice the mass.
One theory was that shark sex was so fraught for mature females, they only came into a male populated area when they were ready to mate.
'’But we just don’t know.’’
Duffy said reports of mating in Otago Harbour should not concern residents with the area and wider coastline known haunts of great whites.
Three people died from shark attacks off Dunedin's coast in the 1960s, with those stories featuring in Stuff's series: Below the Surface.
Duffy said to help verify and add to Ledgerwood's account, marine scientists would love a video of great whites mating.
'’Just do it. They will be preoccupied . . . you won’t have to worry about them.'’