When two former AFL players took their boat out over the weekend, they weren’t expecting what they would encounter.
The hundreds of sharks captured encircling the dinghy were just one of a number of encounters captured off Queensland’s coast at the weekend, with crystal waters providing the perfect window into the abundant underwater world.
Former Gold Coast Suns players Ryan Davis and Matt Shaw snapped up the incredible vision and posted it to social media.
Locals were stunned by the sight.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” paddl-boarder Lauren Collofello said.
“You’d be lucky to see one shark let alone such a big group of sharks and a critically endangered and vulnerable hammerhead shark.
“It’s quite extraordinary.”
Collofello and her partner Justin also filmed about 20 scalloped hammerheads off Burleigh.
From GoPros to drones, ocean lovers captured the extraordinary vision from every angle.
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“I did see some drone footage later of some large bull sharks of that morning so I’m glad I didn’t see those,” Collofello said.
Sea World Shark Bay supervisor Siobhan Houlihan said the swarms were nothing to be worried about.
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“I don’t believe there’s any reason anyone should be concerned,” she said.
“It’s always important that we’re shark smart around sharks but I personally would love to have seen some of this footage for myself.”
The CSIRO is currently calling on citizen scientists to help record shark egg cases by downloading the Shark Trust app.
“You can navigate to the great egg case hunt project and that’s where you can take a photo of your egg case you can look through identification keys and log your findings,” Helen O’Neill from the CSIRO said.
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