Fishermen reportedly spotted an extremely rare breed of shark 30 miles off the coast of San Diego. The megamouth sharks are an elusive breed with years passing between sightings.
Early on Sunday, Val Costescu, David Stabile, and Andrew Chang went fishing off the coast when they captured a video of two megamouth sharks swimming under their boat.
Chang, who owns a small fishing-equipment business, recognized the rare species right away.
“Right when we got close, he threw out oh my gosh I think that’s a megamouth,” Stabile told CBS 8.
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The friends took their footage to Scripps Institution of Oceanography to confirm what they saw.
“I think with each person we were put in contact with, the gravity of everything started to sink in with us that we truly had an out of this world unique experience,” Stabile added.
Since their discovery in 1976, there have only been 269 confirmed sightings of megamouths in the world, not including the two in San Diego.
“This may be a mating pair: the second video shows a male (claspers clearly visible) with a damaged left pectoral fin; the first video is of a scarred shark that may be a female (no visible claspers),” Alisa Schulmman-Janiger, a research associate at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said in a Facebook post.
The Museum of Florida noted that this was the first recorded time two megamouths have ever been observed together.
