A recent video of a humpback whale reportedly shielding a diver from a circling tiger shark has been making the rounds on social media.
The video, taken in September of 2017, shows biologist Nan Hauser of the Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation snorkeling alongside an adult humpback whale off the coast of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. The 46-foot whale can be seen nudging Hauser and sheltering the diver under its pectoral fin as a large tiger shark loomed nearby.
The large predator continued to circle nearby after Hauser returned to her boat.
“I looked off in the distance, and I saw another whale who was quite frantically tail slapping this other animal, which I thought was another whale,” Hauser said in an interview with NPR’s Ari Shapiro. “And I looked at it, and then I saw it swimming towards me. But it was – the tail fin was going side to side instead of up and down. So my mind quickly went, oh, my gosh. That is a shark.”
Hauser believed that the whale was actively trying to protect her from the predator.
Whales and other marine mammals such as dolphins have displayed this sort of behaviors before but some are skeptical of the footage. According to the National Geographic article:
Jim Darling, a humpback whale researcher from Whale Trust Maui, didn’t see any obvious signs the whale was protecting Hauser from the shark, based on the footage he saw, but he did not discount Hauser’s account. He noted that whales engaging in friendly contact with divers or boats does happen, but that without more information it’s impossible to know what the whale was thinking or if it would have acted the same way without the shark present.
“If someone told me this story, I wouldn’t believe it,” Hauser said. “If it hadn’t been me, if it hadn’t been filmed in three different angles, I wouldn’t believe it. I tried a lot not to anthropomorphize any of the behavior that I see. It’s easy to do, but it’s not a good practice in science.”