Shark Swallows Camera Then Films Divers From Inside Mouth
While diving off the coast of Freeport in The Bahamas, Andrea Ramos Nascimento captured what it looks like to be eaten by a shark when one almost swallowed his camera.
Ramos was feeding tiger sharks on February 9 when a curious specimen decided to take a bite on his Insta360 X4 housed in underwater casing.
The handy thing about 360-degree cameras is the ability to choose different angles in the editing suite. Case in point, as the shark swallows the device, the view spins around so the audience can see a group of divers staring into its jaws before spinning back around to get a shot of its gills.
The tiger shark eventually gets bored and spits the Insta360 back out again and Ramos is able to retrieve his camera with the footage still intact.
“The tiger sharks of Tiger Beach have a unique hobby: stealing cameras,” Ramos writes in an Instagram post. “Shiny objects, lights, and sounds catch their attention, and since they don’t have hands, they explore everything with their mouths. Some divers have watched their GoPros disappear into a shark’s mouth, only to see it swim away like it just won a prize.”
In fact in Ramos’s previous video, he shared another example of one of the curious creatures taking a bite on one of his cameras.
Tiger sharks are iconic apex predators in the Bahamas; known for their size, power, and curiosity. The beasts can grow up to 14 feet (4.3 meters) long and weigh over 1,400 pounds (635 kg). They are named after the dark stripes that appear along their bodies which fade as they mature.
Tiger sharks live in the Bahamas because of the country’s warm, clear waters and abundant food supply. Tiger Beach, off the west coast of Grand Bahama Island, is world-renowned for hosting close encounters with tiger sharks, where the creatures are accustomed to humans.
Although tiger sharks are in the top three species involved in shark attacks (below great whites and bull sharks), most interactions with humans are peaceful and attacks are extremely rare.