Stefania Muller, Creative Producer at Obsessively Creative, writes about a recent shoot where the team made revolutionary findings about newly discovered behaviours of the great white shark, including the finding that great whites hunt at night.


Since the mid-nineties it was a documented fact that the method used by great white sharks to hunt seals was to stalk and attack from the depths at great speed - so fast that they would breach clear out of the water. This was regularly documented at False Bay, which became a worldwide filming location for such great white behaviour. A researcher doing her PhD on these sharks documented that the sharks hunted from dawn until early morning, and from late afternoon until dusk. In other words, great white sharks needed light to see their target.

Although in a recent Nat Geo program there is footage of scientists dissecting a shark's eye and deducing that in fact, a great white can see at night, their findings were never proven nor scientifically published in journals and were therefore non-conclusive. Until now, nobody has ever documented natural night time predations by great whites.

Our story proves that great white sharks hunt at night.

Crew
Stefania Muller (ex Lamberti): A wildlife filmmaker and producer for the past 16 years. Stef started producing documentaries on the marine world, then gradually moved terrestrial as well. She recently started a new dynamic company called Obsessively Creative. The challenge of the company is to find untold stories and source state of the art equipment to film them.
Charlene Waite: Charlene started her career as a drama and commercials editor but found her niche in the creative storytelling world of natural history. She is a partner in Obsessively Creative.
Phil Vail: Cameraman extraordinaire. No shoot is too difficult, no task impossible. He thrives on challenges to 'get the shot'.
Ryan Johnson: The scientist. He's been doing field research in Mossel Bay, South Africa for six years. His research has given science invaluable information and opened up a new window into the mysterious life of the great white shark.

The place Mossel Bay
Until Ryan spent so much time researching the great white population of Mossel Bay, this was never considered as a fantastic great white destination comparable to sites like False Bay, Cape Town and Dyer Island, Gansbaai. Ryan's research and our documentary will prove otherwise

Production notes
Charlene Waite, editor and partner in Obsessively Creative, has always had a passion for great whites and specifically the great whites of her home town Mossel Bay. As for myself (Stef), I've always loved sharks, having dived with the likes of great whites, bull sharks, tiger sharks, whale sharks and others for our documentaries. We started research and development - that's how we found Ryan Johnson - a scientist who had been studying the great whites of Mossel Bay for over six years. His research is unique. One of the things he was adamant about was that he had personally witnessed these great whites hunt and breach at night.

The challenge we faced was how to shoot this (if it did happen) at night without using lights and without chumming. Lights and chum would have defeated the object of recording true great white behaviour.

We opted to use an Image Intensifier, which is a special lens that fits between the HD camera and the lens. This makes the lens very sensitive to light, so sensitive that moon light is enough to light the image. We also used a thermal camera, which is a thermal image enhancer (also known as a microbalometre), this camera is sensitive to temperatures and can even identify low frequency colour temperature that are unseen by the human eye. The chip in this camera only records 8 seconds at a time so we had to come up with a way to download the images as the camera was recording, onto a laptop.

Problems we faced
Armed with all this equipment we were ready to film at night. But how were we going to know where the shark was going to breach? Ryan came up with the perfect solution - tag two sharks with acoustic pingers so that researchers on a separate boat could follow the sharks day and night until one of them went to seal island and started circling and patrolling the waters around the island. From the filming boat we towed a decoy which was a precise silicon replica of a seal, so that cameraman Phillip Vail on the HDCam with the image intensifier, and Charlene with the thermal camera, had some point of reference to follow.

The actual filming
Weather blew us out of the water for the first week.

Monday, 30 July 2007, was our first opportunity to go out to sea. We hadn't tagged a shark yet so we basically went out blind. We put out our 'Robo seal' - a radio controlled seal exactly the same as a decoy, only that this one could be remote controlled to swim up and down near the island. Within ten minutes a shark attacked it! We were ecstatic! But it was dusk and not night yet, and disappointingly the rest of the evening was uneventful.

On Tuesday we tagged two sharks. From late afternoon we followed one of them, who chose to play cat and mouse with us. We started off a few kilometres along the coast (about 400-800 metres from the beach). Shed swim slowly 200 metres towards Seal Island and then do a 180 turn and go back 100 metres. This carried on for several hours until we finally reached seal island. But she went around the island once, and then took us all the way back to where we started. The next morning we went out at 4am. One of the tagged sharks had left the bay and the other was basically in the same place where we left her the night before.

Wednesday morning we managed to film a breach but it wasnt technically night. The same happened early that evening.

Tuesday the 2nd, and we were beginning to wonder if Ryan had spent a little too much time alone in his boat, following sharks over the years, and that his "night hunting" was all in his mind! By evening (the last night of our shoot because another cold front was approaching the town) one of the sharks was 'running' circles around the island! The tracking boat was zooming off in all directions. It was a perfectly still night, but the moon hadn't risen yet. The shark was extremely active from the minute we arrived there at about 5pm. Technically night begins 40 minutes after the sun sets, and sunset was at 5.31pm. By 6.30pm the great white was still patrolling. Group after group of seals left the island to go fishing. By 7.20pm Charlene was focusing the thermal camera on the porpoising seals and Phil was relentlessly focusing on the decoy. As we turned the boat to go past the island the decoy went into a very dark area with only lights from an oil tanker behind. And that's when the shark breached clear out of the water mouthing at our decoy! The first night breech ever to be caught on camera!

This shoot was special for many reasons: Ryan Johnson's scientific studies discovered unique great white shark behaviour that great whites do hunt in pitch darkness; Phil Vail is the first professional cameraman to film a great white breaching at night; Charlene and I have THE shot that will make our great white story truly unique and not just another shark story. By getting this shot, we have made wildlife filming history.

When we presented the sequence at WildTalk Africa, NHK, Nat Geo, Animal Planet and NHUA members on the panel all expressed keen interest in the programme


Submitted by Stefania Muller