The journal Coral Reefs has ran what is possibly the first photograph ever taken of a thresher shark giving live birth in the ocean, Fox News reported on Monday.
Attila E. Kaszo shot the image of the pelagic thresher shark in 2013 during a dive in the Philippines led by the University of Chester in the United Kingdom. The dive was routine, and Oliver said he "freaked out" when he saw Kaszo's final image.
The image is so groundbreaking because this particular breed of shark has a low birth rate and is classified as vulnerable to overexploitation by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Oliver states that pregnant sharks are hardly ever spotted in the wild and that little is known about births within the open ocean. The shark swam back and forth for four minutes and the picture was originally taken to identify the animal. After it was processed, the team relalized there was a small shark head coming out of its mother.
Dr Simon Thorrold, a senior scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said the photograph was astounding.
"I have never seen a comparable image for any other pelagic shark," he said, according to BBC News. "It may well be, or at least the first time that the event has been photographed, but this is always difficult to say definitively."
