A Southern California whale-watching operator has captured rare footage showing enormous basking sharks feeding with fin whales 55 miles beyond San Diego.
The footage captured during a crew trip on Wednesday briefly shows Domenic Biagini, owner of Gone Whale Watching San Diego, swimming alongside one of the harmless sharks.
“It was surreal,” he told For The Win Outdoors. “You can know it’s a big animal, but you don’t realize just how big it really is until you’re swimming next to it.”
Basking sharks are the second-largest sharks, next to whale sharks, and can measure nearly 40 feet. Fin whales are the second in size to blue whales, the largest animals on the planet, and can measure 80-plus feet.
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Both species are filter feeders and on Wednesday both gorged on a vast bloom of shrimp-like krill southwest of San Diego.
Biagini said three basking sharks shared a large area with perhaps 30 fin whales – an unusually large gathering of fin whales – and his crew captured footage from various angles.
At 3:27 a fin whale and basking shark can be seen swimming toward one another and the whale veers to avoid a possible collision.
Basking sharks, known to “bask” near the surface, were overfished decades ago and have not recovered.
Limited data suggest that populations remain below historic levels, according to a research paper published by Frontiers in Marine Science in 2018.
Sightings off California are rare but “if they do show we expect them in the spring and summer and then to depart in the fall,” Heidi Dewar, a senior researcher at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the paper’s primary authors, told For The Win Outdoors. “It’s nice to see that there are still a few out there.”
A tagging study conducted from 2010 to 2011 suggested that, nearshore, basking sharks migrate north in the summer and “prefer shelf and slope habitat around San Diego, Point Conception and Monterey Bay.”
Two of four tagged sharks left the coast in the summer and fall. By January, one had traveled to Baja California’s tip and another had traveled west, almost to Hawaii.
Offshore, both spent considerable time in very deep water.
Basking sharks are impressive because of their size but also the manner by which they feed, with enormous mouths agape as they swim through and consume plankton.
Stated Biagini on Facebook: “Since the crew had dive gear on board for our special project, we quickly slipped in the water to join these gentle sharks as they peacefully glided through the krill with mouths open!
“A truly once-in-a-lifetime moment as basking sharks have become almost completely absent from waters around San Diego in the last decade, and are almost never seen in water this blue!”
