Here’s A School Of Sharks The Size Of Ten Football Fields Swimming In The Gulf Of Mexico

Video taken 30 miles off the coast of Grand Isle, Louisiana shows a school of sharks migrating back north in the Gulf of Mexico after the long winter. Once you factor in the depth of the water, and how there are plenty of sharks swimming both below the ones on the surface and out of the camera’s frame, this school of sharks appears to be the size of about ten football fields. So if you were planning on spending Spring Break anywhere in the northern Gulf of Mexico (especially Grand Isle) now might be a good time to reevaluate whether or not you want to go swimming.

As I mentioned before, this footage was captured 30-miles off the coast of Grand Isle, Louisiana, so unless you plan on doing any oil rig fishing chances are that you’re not actually going to come face to face with this massive school of migrating sharks. The Huffington Post is reporting that the sharks are likely Blacktip or Spinner sharks, which I guess seems logical for this time of year, though I’ve always found the Blacktip Sharks tend to hang around Florida much later into the Summer to catch the may/june run of Tarpon, where they feast on the fish for two long months.

HuffPo caught up with the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, George Burgess, who was apparently just as shocked as everyone else to see such a massive migration of sharks this time of year:

George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, was also surprised to see this type of gathering off the coast of Louisiana during this time of year.

“Normally, we don’t see sharks in schools. They’re solitary animals,” Burgess told The Huffington Post. “But often times they’ll aggregate around a food source.”

Martin T. O’Connell, director of the Nekton Research Laboratory at the University of New Orleans, thinks that the sharks might’ve been “artificially attracted” to the oil rig.”

“Prey fish concentrate at rigs,” he told HuffPost, “and, therefore, so will sharks. I would guess that if the photographer moved away from the rig a few miles, the shark densities would be less dramatic.”

O’Connell also emphasized that this is normal shark behavior and not a “frenzy,” as the video’s title implies.

For those of you wondering just what constitutes a ‘shark frenzy’ we actually shared footage of that a few months back when a man caught a massive feeding frenzy off the North Carolina coast.

Before you go psyching yourself out about this gigantic school of sharks, just know that they pose almost ZERO threat to any human being. They’re 30 miles offshore, and hugging the oil rigs to drum up bait fish for easy feeding. This is completely normal behavior for sharks. However, if you are looking to do some epic shark fishing then the oil rigs off of Grand Isle, Louisiana are the PERFECT place to do that right now, or so it seems.

[HuffPo / The Times Picayune]