Great White Shark Jumps Through The Air In Jaw-Dropping Series Of Pictures From South Africa (PHOTOS)

Determined Photographer Spent Three Days Luring Huge Shark With Fake Rubber Seal

A very patient photographer spent days setting up an amazing series of photos featuring a great white shark leaping out of the water.

Dana Allen captured the magnificent moment in False Bay, off Cape Town, South Africa, the New York Daily News notes. He baited the shark with a fake seal made out of rubber.

"The strike, when it happens, takes just over a second, up and out and back into the water," Allen told the Herald Sun. "The whole event took place in a little over a second but it is one instant that will remain frozen in my mind's eye for the rest of my life."

jawsome shark great white attack

jawsome shark great white attack

This summer, researchers in the Cape Coast inadvertently got themselves an up-close and way-too-personal look at the impressive predators when a 9-foot, half-ton shark leapt into their boat.

"Next thing I know I hear a splash, and see a white shark breach out of the water from [the] side of the boat hovering, literally, over the crew member who was chumming [throwing food bait] on the port side," Oceans Research team leader Dorien Schroder said at the time.

Seal Island, where Schroder's team was working, is the only place in the world where great whites are known to consistently perform dramatic aerial breaches.

The Discovery Channel's Shark Week 2012 featured "Air Jaws Apocalypse," an expedition on Seal Island that studied and recorded this amazing phenomenon.

Great white shark populations are "decreasing in numbers and are rare due to years of being hunted by man," according to the World Wildlife Fund. They are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

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