In this photo from Jan. 24, 2017, provided by Chris Hasson, 10-year-old Eden Hasson, Chris' son, surfs near what is believed to be a great white shark at Samurai Beach, Port Stephens, Australia. (Chris Hasson via AP)
Cue the music from “Jaws.”
An incredible photo that has gone viral shows a boy in Australia surfing a wave— while just in front and beneath him a shark is lurking, perhaps a great white.
The 10-year-old surfer, Eden Hasson, said he was oblivious to the powerful predator beneath the waves until his father, Chris Hasson, showed him the photograph.
The photo has since made headlines from Australia to the UK to the United States, and a Facebook post by Hasson about the incident has generated over a thousand reactions.
"If I was on the wave and saw it, I probably would've freaked out and fell off," Eden told an Australian TV station after the brush with the shark. "I was lucky I didn't fall off."
The incident occurred at a beach called Samurai, north of Sydney. Chris Hasson told the Associated Press that he told the boy to get off the water after seeing the ghostly image of the shark in the photograph.
"I quickly called him in and whistled,” Hasson said. His son, he said, “saw a shape in the wave and thought it was seaweed and felt something as he went over the top — he got his leg rope caught on something — but he thought nothing of it until he saw the photo.”
MAKO SHARK TRAVELS 13,000 MILES IN LESS THAN TWO YEARS
The father also said that it was a “gut feeling” that spurred him to review the photos. “I just had a gut feeling so I went into the photos and zoomed in and went ‘No way’," Hasson said, according to the Daily Telegraph.
The same Australian state where this incident took place, New South Wales, was host to a tragedy in 2015, when a 41-year-old Japanese surfer died after a shark attack. The shark attack rate in recent years in Australia has been higher than average.
But one shark expert told the Associated Press that in the case of the “photobombing” shark, the animal was likely just trying to avoid the surfboard.
“From the angle, it looks like the shark was spooked and is rolling away from the board to escape it," Chin said. "There is no way that this is a hunting approach."
This is not the only shark to make headlines recently. A mako shark named Hell’s Bay has astounded researchers by breaking a record: in less than two years, it cruised an astounding 13,000 miles in the Atlantic.
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