Circling the Web this week is an incredible video showing Valerie Taylor, a world-renowned shark expert, hand-feeding a great white shark off the side of a boat. After placing a fish into the fearsome creature’s mouth, she even leans down and pats it on the nose.
“I think the shark and I had an understanding,” Taylor says in a voiceover of the footage, which aired in a TV documentary called “Shadow of the Shark.” “This one, I had a feeling for.”
Great white sharks, according to Yannis Papastamatiou, a research biologist in the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, are intelligent and good learners. Despite the great white’s reputation as a vicious hunter, like many wild animals, with enough practice and patience (and fish), researchers can condition them to take handouts from research vessels. It isn’t unheard of, Papastamatiou said, for researchers to hand-feed them.
http://www.livescience.com/14433-wild-video-woman-feeds-great-white-shark-hand.html