This is the terrifying moment student divers came face-to-face with an extremely rare deep-water shark off California.
Murky footage showed the prickly shark suddenly appear out of the darkness during the alarming encounter on the La Jolla coast near San Diego last week.
The clip showed one of the group’s head’s whip round when a huge fin emerged just above the seabed in front of them.
It was followed by the rest of the 7ft beast, which turned away sharply as the divers flickered their torches towards it.
Recreational diver Liam Dougherty, who filmed the entire encounter, told CBS 8: “I was terrified. I’m terrified of sharks.”
Cali Lingle from UC San Diego, who was also on the dive, said on social media: “I thought the shark was a sevengill at first, but I saw two dorsal fins and the shark looked at least seven feet long.”
She continued: “I was like, this is probably going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I just had. It felt like discovering a new species at first because none of us knew of the shark beforehand.”
She added: “It reminded me of how big the ocean really is and how little we know, and gave me motivation to keep protecting and caring for our mysterious and beautiful oceans.”
Prickly sharks are usually found in deeper, colder waters up to 3,600ft in the Pacific Ocean and not along the California coastline.
The deep-sea dwellers are extremely elusive and are rarely seen by humans, with no official estimates on how many there are in the wild.
Despite its name and size, they are not a danger to humans – having earned their nickname due to their thorn-like denticles.
Zach Merson, a Scripps PhD student who studies sharks, told CBS 8 he it was unusual the shark had strayed from its deeper habitat due to the area’s warmer water temperature.
But he added: “Here in La Jolla, we have a submarine canyon. So, we have a really deep habitat right next to a really shallow habitat.
“So, it’s not surprising at all that prickly sharks will come up sometimes to look for food in that shallower habitat.”