This Fearless Woman Peacefully Feeds a Great White Shark Like It’s a Puppy

The post This Fearless Woman Peacefully Feeds a Great White Shark Like It’s a Puppy appeared first on A-Z Animals.

Thinking about “friendly” animals often brings to mind adorable, snuggly creatures we’d love to pet, like puppies or kittens. These animals are usually cute, cuddly, and don’t pose much of a threat. But for some extraordinary individuals, including the woman in this YouTube video, the idea of a “friendly” animal goes far beyond just warm and fuzzy mammals, even including creatures like sharks! Can you imagine hand-feeding or petting a massive great white shark? It’s something you might just have to see to believe!

What Do Great White Sharks Eat?

Movies like Jaws (1975) have given many people a strong fear of great white sharks, but these animals aren’t actually man-eating monsters. As apex predators, they are at the very top of the ocean’s food chain, but they mainly hunt marine mammals like sea lions and seals. They may also eat mollusks, seabirds, crustaceans, or the occasional whale carcass. Younger sharks eat large fish, rays, and smaller species of sharks.

Human-Shark Interactions

Although great white sharks can cause serious injuries and even death, they don’t actively hunt humans. In fact, considering how often these sharks swim near people in the ocean, the number of attacks is surprisingly low. Studies in California, for instance, revealed that humans and sharks share the same space about 97% of the time without even realizing it!

Sharks are intelligent and curious animals. They often observe humans from a distance, and occasionally move in for a closer look. The danger with great whites, however, comes from how they explore their world: with their mouths, which contain around 300 sharp teeth. In most cases, however, these sharks only bite once and then swim away. They are dangerous, but they are definitely not the man-eating monsters that Hollywood often portrays.

Hand-Feeding an Apex Predator

Generally, great white sharks are not “friendly” with humans. However, interactions like the one featured in this YouTube video are more common than you might think. Researchers often train sharks as part of their scientific studies. Many researchers patiently and carefully work with wild sharks until the animals can gently take food directly from their hands.

However, Valerie Taylor — the woman in the YouTube video — has taken her interactions with sharks much further than most researchers. As the clip demonstrates, she is very comfortable around sharks, even a large and dangerous great white. Taylor and her husband spent many years filming sharks in their natural habitat. They were the first to film great white sharks in the wild without the protection of a cage. They even had a custom chainmail suit made, which Valerie wore, placing tuna fillets inside to encourage the sharks to approach her. Even now, at 89 years old, Taylor continues to dive and teach others about the amazing role sharks play in our oceans.

The post This Fearless Woman Peacefully Feeds a Great White Shark Like It’s a Puppy appeared first on A-Z Animals.