Shark-diving tourists captured some incredible footage of a massive 12-foot shark popping up beside their boat and swimming on its back for a few seconds. A super-rare thing for a shark to do, much less capture on film.
“We do not see them do this very often at all. In fact, it was the first time Captain Dave had seen it himself,” the shark-diving company wrote on Facebook.
The diving company is called Calypso Star Charters and they were floating off the coast of South Australia near the Neptune Islands in Port Lincoln when it happened. They added that they’re not sure why it was swimming upside down with its mouth wide open.
Usually, when a shark is on its back it goes into a trance-like paralysis state called tonic immobility. Researchers typically do this to sharks when they want to study them because it subdues them and keeps them from biting.
Laying them on their back they become disorientated, it slows their breathing and when you turn them back over they snap out of it. However, what this shark was doing seemed to be different.
It seemed to be fully functional and not experiencing tonic immobility when Wendy Bower-Leech, one of the tourists on the boat was lucky enough to be filming the shark as it showed off its swimming skills.
“It swam on its back for several seconds as depicted in the video but the shark was in the vicinity of our dive cage for a couple of hours much to the delight of our guests,” the spokesman told Fox News in a Facebook interview.
Watch The Shark Swimming Upside Down Video Below