Wissenschaftler fangen einen Hai -Dreier vor der Kamera | „Für beide Männer war es schnell vorbei, eine nach dem anderen. Der erste dauerte 63 Sekunden, der andere 47.“

From the article: It’s a rare occurrence for scientists to witness sharks mating in the wild. It’s even rarer to catch three leopard sharks—two males and one female—engaging in what amounts to a threesome in the wild on camera, particularly since they are considered an endangered species. But that’s just what one enterprising marine biology team achieved, describing the mating sequence in careful, clinical detail in a paper [published](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10164-025-00866-4) in the Journal of Ethology.

It’s not like scientists don’t know anything about leopard shark mating behavior; rather, most of that knowledge comes from studying the sharks in captivity. Whether the behavior is identical in the wild is an open question because there hadn’t been any documented observations of leopard shark mating practices in the wild—until now.

Hugo Lassauce, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) in Australia, was working with the Aquarium des Lagons in Nouméa, New Caledonia, to monitor sharks off the coast of that South Pacific territory. Lassauce has been snorkeling daily with sharks for a year as part of that program—always with an accompanying boat for safety purposes—and had seen bits of the leopard shark mating behavior before, but never the entire sequence. Then he spotted a female shark on the sand below with two males hanging onto her pectoral fins—classic pre-copulation (courtship) behavior observed in captive leopard sharks.

“I told my colleague to take the boat away to avoid disturbance, and I started waiting on the surface, looking down at the sharks almost motionless on the sea floor,“ said Lassauce. “I waited an hour, freezing in the water, but finally they started swimming up. It was over quickly for both males, one after the other. The first took 63 seconds, the other 47. Then the males lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively.” (Add your own salacious jokes here. You know you’re thinking them.)

Whales: pffft, that’s nothin‘.