A photographer in south Florida was amazed when her drone captured the moment a hammerhead shark attacked and killed another shark.
When Marissa Wil first saw splashing in the water, she thought it might be dolphins. As she got closer, she soon realised it was a gigantic shark.
“My coffee didn’t wake me up nearly as much as this footage,” she says. “I apologise for the jerky flying, I forgot to breathe for a bit there.”
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Wil flies her drone around 90 metres high so she knew that whatever was causing the commotion was something big – otherwise, it wouldn’t have shown up on camera. “It would take a few dolphins to make a splash that large,” she says.
Flying the drone closer, she saw the distinctive dorsal fin cutting through the water and knew this belonged to a big shark. “As the whitewater faded, I saw it was a great hammerhead,” Wil says.
“This wasn’t some small jack crevalle the hammer was chasing, this was a reef shark.”
Her initial shock only increased when she realised what was happening: the hammerhead was chasing another shark. “This wasn’t some small jack crevalle the hammer was chasing, this was a reef shark,” she says.
Will estimated that the smaller shark was around one metre long so the enormous hammer must have been between 3.5 and 4.2 metres.
Everything happened in a flash. “The first splash to rip off the tail only took a minute,” says Wil. In the chaos, it was hard to tell what the hammerhead would do next. “One wrong move with the joystick and I’d lose sight of what was unfolding before me.”
After the initial attack, the predator circled around its victim for several minutes. It “eventually ate the head about 10 minutes later,” says Wil.
This incredible encounter was unlike anything Wil had seen from the sky before. For her, it’s is a great example of how drones can help us observe remarkable wildlife encounters without disturbing the animals – and sharing her footage with the world via Instagram was the cherry on top. “The best way to observe nature is from a distance,” she says. “If I flew lower, I never would have noticed this."
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