What happens when a shark mistakes your camera for its next meal?
Diver Andrea Ramos Nascimento found out firsthand during a routine feeding session off the Bahamas — a lighthearted adventure that turned her equipment into an unwitting participant in nature’s dinner theater. The resulting footage offers a rare (and slightly slimy) peek into a tiger shark’s dental hygiene routine — and a reminder to keep gadgets far from greedy jaws.
As Nascimento and her team tossed fish to a group of tiger sharks, one overeager diner bypassed the menu entirely, chomping down on her camera instead. The device tumbled into the shark’s mouth, treating viewers to a front-row seat of its jagged teeth and shadowy throat. “Shark bait ooh ha ha!” quipped amused commenters online as the camera captured the predator’s gills fluttering in the ocean water.
A shot of the divers after the shark ‘ate’ the camera. Courtesy of Andrea Ramos Nascimento / Peter Strom / Aloha Divers Okinawa & Epic Diving via Storyful
Another wrote: ‘Wait… the camera was inside the shark’s mouth? That’s wild! Glad it survived!’, a third said: ‘That camera got an up-close, way too close, view of the shark’s world — talk about a wild experience.'”
‘Talk about a close call — this diver got a front-row seat to shark feeding time.’
Unfortunately, the shark’s impromptu “snack” didn’t go smoothly. After a brief struggle, divers pried the camera free, with Nascimento lunging to rescue it before the curious creature circled back. The Florida Museum of Natural History (FMNH) said this boldness isn’t surprising — tiger sharks are “among the largest of the sharks,” stretching up to 18 feet long, though their heft makes them a “slow-moving shark,” the museum said.
Part of “The Big Three” species known for human encounters — alongside bull and great white sharks — tiger sharks are no strangers to mischief. The Florida Museum notes they’re also among the “big three” in attack stats, ranking “second behind great whites in the number of attacks on humans.” Fortunately, this incident ended with laughter: the camera survived, the divers lived to tell the tail, and the shark? Let’s just say it learned the hard way that tech isn’t tasty.
A clip of the camera-eating shark. Courtesy of Andrea Ramos Nascimento / Peter Strom / Aloha Divers Okinawa & Epic Diving via Storyful
Shockingly, this video was filmed just a bit before another video surfaced of the moment a kayaker was swallowed whole by a humpback whale off Chilean Patagonia for a few seconds — before the humpback whale decided the young man wasn’t food and miraculously spit him back out.
Adrian Simancas was kayaking the whale emerged from the water and quickly swallowed the young man and his yellow kayak. His father had been filming when the shocking event happened. “When I came up and started floating, I was scared that something might happen to my father too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia,” Adrián said.
