A 10-foot great white shark was filmed swimming near a group of young Malibu swimmers by drone on Wednesday, 22 July 2026, inspecting them before slipping back out to deeper water unnoticed.
The footage was captured by Carlos Gauna, a wildlife photographer and drone videographer known online as “the Malibu Artist,” as reported by Fox News. He was standing more than a mile away when the great white shark drifted towards the swimmers near Malibu.
What the great white shark did near Malibu swimmers
Gauna has filmed plenty of sharks over the years, yet this sighting rattled even him. Sharing the clip on Instagram, he laid bare just how tense the moment felt as the predator closed in on the unsuspecting group.
On Instagram, Gauna wrote:
“I don’t often get nervous, but this was one of those rare instances where I did.”
The swimmers never knew the shark was there. It hovered near them, sizing up the group, then turned and cruised back into deeper water without so much as a ripple of panic on the surface.
Nobody was harmed, and the beach day carried on.
The clip took off online almost immediately, racking up reactions from people equal parts fascinated and unnerved.
Watching a predator that size share the water with swimmers who had no clue proved impossible to scroll past, and comment sections filled with the same nervous question about how often this happens.
Gauna has built a following precisely because he films these animals doing what they do out of sight, and his footage regularly reshapes how the public pictures sharks.
For him to admit nerves said plenty about how close the shark drifted to the young swimmers in the water.
How drone footage changed the great white shark story
Drone footage like Gauna’s has quietly rewritten what we thought we knew. The aerial view has shown that sharks inspect people far more often than anyone once believed, cruising past swimmers and surfers who have no idea. Experts stressed, though, that actual bites stayed extremely rare.
Southern California’s warm, shallow bays have become something of a nursery for young white sharks, which gather there to feed and grow before heading offshore. That overlap of prime shark habitat and packed summer beaches is exactly why moments like this keep surfacing off the coast.
The encounter followed a record-breaking year for California shark activity in 2025. Marine scientists have pointed to warming ocean temperatures and marine heatwaves, which they said were pushing higher concentrations of juvenile white sharks into shallow coastal water through 2026.
As the water warms and more of these young sharks move inshore, encounters like the one off Malibu look set to keep landing on our feeds. The lesson from Gauna’s drone was simple enough, that something big may be watching, long before anyone thinks to look up.
