Life

Internet Claims Viral Photo Of 10-Year-Old Surfing Over Great White Shark Might Actually Be An Optical Illusion

#Surfing
by Last Updated

For the past 7 days, a photograph purporting to show a 10-year-old boy surfing over a great white shark has been going viral. What makes this picture so incredible is the boy’s father was on the beach taking pictures of his son surfing and neither the boy or dad had any idea there was a great white shark there until they got home and looked at the images up close. Well, it turns out that there might never have been a shark at all because there’s now a lot of backlash from the surfing community online about what actually took place.

Here’s the original photograph, the one that’s gone viral over the last week:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BPxI8rWBSwQ/

I’ve already seen this image shared countless times on other websites, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Almost everyone was immediately convinced that this image shows a great white shark…but not the surfing community. The surfing community believes what the dead photographed is actually the most mundane occurrence in surfing: when a surfer ‘duck dives’ underneath a wave while paddling out past the break.

Over at TheDailyMail they’ve collected comments from surfers calling bullshit on this image, as well as a version of the image that has been highlighted to show how it could easily just be another surfer in the water:




Honestly, it’s impossible to tell what’s happening here. It could easily be just another surfer duck diving, but that could very well be a great white shark underneath the wave. The argument about ‘tonic immobility’, what happens when sharks pass out when they’re flipped upside down, I’m not sure that holds any weight because the shark could just be changing directions within the wave. And light refraction plays some weird tricks underwater.

It is MUCH MORE LIKELY that there was a surfer duck diving underneath the wave than a massive great white shark showing up unannounced because encounters with great white sharks really aren’t common. But I’m not sure if we’ll ever know what’s actually happening in this image. What do you bros think is going on here?

If you need to look at the evidence more closely you can CLICK HERE to head on over to The Daily Mail!