California woman captures suspected great white shark's dramatic breach on camera

Calli Brooks was at Pismo State Beach doing what she'd planned to do that day: photograph whales. Her son was at junior lifeguard camp nearby, and she had her camera ready, waiting for the right moment to capture something worth keeping. What she got instead was something far more rare—a great white shark, airborne, suspended for a fraction of a second between water and sky.

The breach happened suddenly, the shark launching itself several feet into the air in a movement so dramatic it cut across her frame. Brooks had been focused on the whales when the shark appeared, almost as if it had decided to photobomb her shot. The image she captured shows the animal mid-leap, its body arcing upward with unmistakable power.

Chris Lowe, who directs the shark lab at California State University Long Beach, examined the photograph and identified the animal as almost certainly a great white shark. He noted the proportions and the shape of its fins as the telling details, though he acknowledged the possibility it could be a mako. The distinction matters to researchers, but what matters more is the behavior itself—the fact that it happened at all, and that someone was there to document it.

Why sharks breach remains one of those questions marine biologists haven't fully answered. Lowe offered a theory that has gained traction among researchers: parasites. Sharks, like many ocean animals, accumulate parasites on their skin and bodies. When those parasites become irritating enough, a shark might launch itself out of the water and land hard on its back, using the impact to dislodge them. It's a form of self-maintenance, violent and visible, the kind of behavior that looks dramatic to us but is simply practical to the animal.

Breaches are uncommon enough that when they happen near populated beaches, they tend to make news. A month earlier, in July, a woman named Jan Yamasaki was filming surfers at Magic Island in Honolulu when a shark breached directly in front of one of them. Experts who reviewed that footage suggested it might have been a spinner shark, a blacktip shark, or a sandbar shark—smaller species than the great white, but no less striking in the moment. Two breaches captured on camera within weeks, both in places where people gather, both rare enough to stop and look at.

Brooks' photograph is the kind of image that reminds us the ocean operates on its own schedule, indifferent to whether we're ready to witness it. She came for whales and left with something stranger, something that will likely outlast the memory of the junior lifeguard camp in the stories she tells.