Underwater cameras have recorded the first known footage of two male leopard sharks mating with a female in the wild.
The rare event – filmed around 10 miles off New Caledonia, an archipelago in the south-west Pacific Ocean – shows the two male sharks (both around 2.3m long) mating one after the other with the female.
“It’s rare to witness sharks mating in the wild, but to see it with an endangered species – and film the event – was so exciting that we just started cheering,” says University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) researcher Dr Hugo Lassauce, who filmed the incredible moment.
Lassauce had spent a year snorkelling with sharks as part of a monitoring programme but had never witnessed them mating. “I’d seen males swimming fast after females before and I’d arrived ‘on the scene’ just after a male and female separated, but I’d never seen the whole sequence,” he explains.
On this occasion, a female settled on the seabed with two males gripping her pectoral fins. “I told my colleague to take the boat away to avoid disturbance and I started waiting on the surface, looking down at the sharks almost motionless on the sea floor,” says Lassauce.
“I waited an hour, freezing in the water, but finally they started swimming up. It was over quickly for both males, one after the other. The first took 63 seconds, the other 47.
“Then the males lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively.”
Leopard sharks, also known as zebra sharks for the stripes on their young, are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They are found across the Indo-West Pacific, from Africa’s eastern shores to the Pacific Islands and northern Australia.
Despite their broad range, their wild mating behaviour has remained largely undocumented until now, with most research carried out in aquariums.
Dr Christine Dudgeon, senior research fellow at UniSC and co-author of the follow-up study documenting the behaviour, says the discovery could transform our understanding of these solitary animals. “This evidence suggests the site in New Caledonia is a critical mating habitat, which can inform management and conservation strategies as well as help us understand population dynamics and reproductive behaviours more widely,” she says.
The findings may also support efforts to boost numbers through artificial insemination, adds Dudgeon. “It’s surprising and fascinating that two males were involved sequentially on this occasion. From a genetic diversity perspective, we want to find out how many fathers contribute to the batches of eggs laid each year by females.”
Find out more about the study: Observation of group courtship/copulating behavior for free-living Indo-Pacific Leopard sharks, Stegostoma tigrinum, published in the Journal of Ethology.
Top image: Leopard sharks mating. Credit: Hugo Lassauce-UniSC-Aquarium des Lagons
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