A photographer in Cape Cod, USA, has captured rare footage of a great white shark snatching a fish from a line.
Brian Skerry, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer, spent days on the water with charter captains before filming the behaviour in June 2026.
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The behaviour is known as shark depredation and refers to a predator removing or damaging a fish while it’s being captured or harvested. Fishers along the Cape Cod coastline have reported a surge in the behaviour – suggesting that sharks are making a comeback in the area.
It’s thought they’re being attracted to the increasing numbers of grey seals, which were hunted until the US passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. A 2016 study showed that an estimated 425,000 grey seals move along the Atlantic coast between the US and Canada each year.
Depredation is usually seen above the water’s surface. It’s believed that Skerry’s footage is the first to capture the behaviour underwater.
“It was so sudden, it wasn’t even a second. She just rocketed through and then it was over,” he explains. “My goal was to help people understand that this place, Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine, has a healthy, recovering population of large predatory sharks, particularly great whites.”
NOAA Fisheries note that on the Outer Cape, the risk of drowning from rip tides is much greater than the risk of being attacked by a shark.
