Moctezuma's pod continues their dominance in the Gulf of California. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Orca whales are skilled pack hunters with an ever-growing list of prey . Recently, ocean researchers discovered that the apex predators aren't afraid of taking on equally formidable foes-- great white sharks . Now, a study published on November 3 in the journal documented even more remarkable hunting behavior.

A great white shark was spotted this week swimming in the area of Scarborough, Maine. A drone video captured a great white shark lurking in the waters of a vacation spot in the Northeast. Police in Scarborough, Maine, which is located just south of Portland, confirmed this week that the shark was spotted off the state's coastline. "On Monday, August 11, 2025, Scarborough's Marine Resource Officer received a report of what appeared to be a large shark near Richmond Island and Scarborough Beach," the town wrote on its Facebook page. "Follow-up observations were conducted, and on Tuesday, August 12, 2025, the Marine Resource Officer obtained drone video footage showing a possible great white shark, estimated to be 10–12 feet in length, off the southern end of Richmond Island in the vicinity of Higgins Beach and Scarborough Beach," it added.

The recent widespread adoption of drones for studying marine animals provides opportunities for deriving biological information from aerial imagery. The large scale of imagery data acquired from drones is well suited for machine learning (ML) analysis. Development of ML models for analyzing marine animal aerial imagery has followed the classical paradigm of training, testing, and deploying a new model for each dataset, requiring significant time, human effort, and ML expertise. We introduce Frame Level ALIgment and tRacking (FLAIR), which leverages the video understanding of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) and the vision-language capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). FLAIR takes a drone video as input and outputs segmentation masks of the species of interest across the video. Notably, FLAIR leverages a zero-shot approach, eliminating the need for labeled data, training a new model, or fine-tuning an existing model to generalize to other species. With a dataset of 18,000 drone images of Pacific nurse sharks, we trained state-of-the-art object detection models to compare against FLAIR. We show that FLAIR massively outperforms these object detectors and performs competitively against two human-in-the-loop methods for prompting SAM2, achieving a Dice score of 0.81. FLAIR readily generalizes to other shark species without additional human effort and can be combined with novel heuristics to automatically extract relevant information including length and tailbeat frequency. FLAIR has significant potential to accelerate aerial imagery analysis workflows, requiring markedly less human effort and expertise than traditional machine learning workflows, while achieving superior accuracy. By reducing the effort required for aerial imagery analysis, FLAIR allows scientists to spend more time interpreting results and deriving insights about marine ecosystems.

So much of this year felt like a fever dream: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Which is why, this year, I'm leaning into my nerdish tendencies and rounding up some good, interesting, or inspiring news stories from the science world--promising discoveries, exciting new data, historic events, and unsung heroes. In the hope of providing relief from the hell that has been 2024, here's a non-comprehensive list of the year's coolest science stories, both big and small: Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside, PhD student Phillip Sternes spotted what appears to be a baby great white shark off the coast of California last year. In January, the team published the photos in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes. "Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive," Gauna said in a UC Riverside press release.

Whether a large and fuzzy social media sensation or deep-sea slug slunking around the ocean's Midnight Zone, there are still so many exciting animals on Earth just waiting for their close-up. In that spirit, here are the 11 of the most exciting animal stories that Popular Science covered this year. A wildlife filmmaker and biology doctoral student took what could be the first picture of a newborn great white shark. Filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes were looking for sharks near Santa Barbara on California's central coast. Most great whites are gray on top with white bellies, but Gauana's drone camera showed a roughly 5-foot-long shark pup that had more white on its body than normal.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. You're gonna need a bigger ... drone. Researchers at California State University, Long Beach-based Shark Lab used drones to study juvenile white sharks along the Southern California coastline and how close they swim to humans in the water. Turns out, it's pretty close.

Once rare off Southern California beaches, great white sharks are beginning to show up more often. The newcomers are mostly juvenile sharks, which prefer the warm waters closer to shore. That means many beachgoers who are now spotting sharks have never seen the predators before. "When these little fins started to pop up, everyone was scrambling to figure out what was going on," said Douglas J. McCauley, a marine science professor and the director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A new project using artificial intelligence called SharkEye may help keep track of these fearsome fish.

A remarkable drone video captured off the coast of Cape Cod has caught the first-ever look at a pair of great white sharks interacting in the region. Researchers with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy shared the footage on Twitter this week, revealing the moment the two huge predators appear to square off in the ocean. While the exact nature of the encounter is still unclear, experts say it's not uncommon for these sharks to attack each other when they cross paths. In the video shared by AWSC, one shark can be seen swimming alone before another enters the frame. The latter at first appears to approach cautiously, before speeding up to veer directly into the other. It's the first time two white sharks have been spotted interacting off the coast of Chatham, according to the researchers.

When scientists want to study birds, they have an enormous crowdsourced data set that they can use. When they want to study mammals on land, they can tag them and track them. But what about when scientists want to study marine animals like sharks? The world's oceans are much bigger than its land mass. Human scientists are land creatures, too, so most of their in-person observations are limited to the surface of the water, and the surface is just a fraction of the actual volume of the ocean which averages 2.3 miles deep.

This terrifying footage shows what it would be like to be eaten by a great white shark. Researchers got more than they bargained for when a great white shark took a bite of the underwater camera drone they were using to film in the Pacific Ocean. The resulting footage shows a shark powering through the water, before attempting to swallow the drone in a single bite. Inside the mouth of the predator, the camera continues to film and shows the muscles inside the shark's jaw contracting with effort. The shark eventually spits out the camera and swims away, defeated.