White Shark Mating : New Zealand
Despite decades of research into the habits of white sharks, how and where they mate has largely remained a mystery. During copulation, a male shark uses it teeth to holds the female (who has much thicker skin), then uses its claspers to internally fertilize the female.
The first report came from a Department of Conservation seal observer in New Zealand who witnessed a mating in 1991 at Nugget Point, Southland.
He wrote, wrote “I have unwittingly been fortunate to witness a mating [between two white sharks]. I had thought at the beginning they were fighting as one animal appeared to be attempting to grasp the other with its great mouth, making great gouges in its side. However, they had eventually become motionless, one under the other, turning over from time to time belly to belly. This obvious copulation lasted some 40 minutes before the animals finally parted and glided off in opposite directions.”
Recently Steve Crawford, a marine biologist from the University of Guelph in Canada, interviewed Dick Ledgerwood who also witnessed white sharks mating. Back in November 1997, 15-year-old Ledgerwood was fishing at Sawyers Bay, Otago Harbour when he observed two, four-metre sharks “locked together” mating in just four metres of water...“They Were clenched on...[They stayed] in one spot. Rolling and rolling and rolling.”
“It had been thought white sharks go off on some mid-ocean, deep-water migrations that would be difficult if not impossible to follow and observe,” according to Crawford. “If it turns out that white sharks actually prefer relatively shallow substrates to copulate, this would have an enormous effect on our ability to protect these preferred mating habitats, especially during the mating season, from human interference.”