#Shark named ‘Helen’ drowns whale in first known attack of its kind

A humpback whale is attacked by a great white shark in never-seen-before behavior.
National Geographic/Earth Touch

A great white shark was documented drowning a humpback whale in the first-ever such attack to be recorded. Researchers had previously tagged the whale and named her Helen.

“I honestly did not quite compute what a unique event it was until afterwards,” shark researcher Ryan Johnson, who recorded the superlative event by accident, told Newsweek. “We are talking about one of the planet’s largest predators attacking and killing one of the world’s largest species. It is just fascinating that we live on a planet that can still surprise us with an encounter of this magnitude.”

Johnson was able to capture drone footage of Helen’s epic battle off the coast of South Africa after receiving a tip from the National Sea Rescue Institute about a likely dead whale caught in a net.

In the fight video, Helen bites the juvenile whale’s tail — possibly aiming for a vein to bleed it to death — before putting her weight on its head and dragging it underwater, successfully drowning it.

This whale-killing method is previously unseen in great whites, which know that the move makes them vulnerable to being hit with a brutal blow by an adult humpback’s tail. “I had heard of Orca pods taking on large whales and calves, but honestly thought it was well out of the scope of great white sharks,” said Johnson. “From everything I found, this was really the first verified report of a shark successfully killing a living whale.”

The whale Helen killed, however, was young and had been left behind by its crew on their way to Antarctica, making it a more vulnerable target for such an attack. Helen, realizing her opponent was frail and alone, was able to calculate whether she could succeed with a drowning offensive. “[This] whale was so weakened that it gave the shark the upper hand and thus confidence to instigate the attack,” said Johnson, who described Helen as “large and confident.”

Since making history, Helen has gone rogue: The battery on her tracking device ran out and researchers no longer know her whereabouts.

The footage of Helen is included in National Geographic’s “Shark Vs. Whale,” documentary, to be released as part of Sharkfest this month.