By Arthi Sanpath

One of the largest great white sharks caught off the KZN coast has become the star of an international wildlife documentary series, Inside Nature's Giants.

The 4.3m adolescent female was found dead in shark nets off Zinkwazi Beach at the end of August, and, at the request of a UK film company, Windfall Films, was filmed by the crew as shark experts dissected the creature in Mossel Bay on Friday last week.

Geremy Cliff, head of research at the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board, said: "The shark was found still alive, albeit weak, by a KZN Sharks Board boat crew shortly after first light on 31 August.

"The shark was removed and towed slowly offshore.

"It was then tagged with an external tag before being released."

Cliff said the shark must have been disorientated and swum back towards the shore, because it had been found back in the nets, dead, the next morning.

He said great whites could grow to well over 5m in length.

"It is difficult, though, to determine her age. We have kept vertebrae for determining the age," he said.

The shark was transported to Mossel Bay in a refridgerator truck.

It took an entire day for the shark to be dissected, but Cliff said this had been because the crew wanted to film it from different view points.

It normally took two hours to dissect a shark, he said.

In a year, the board caught on average 20 sharks and this great white was one of the biggest they had caught.

"There were scars on the shark, which could have been as a result of fighting with other sharks," Cliff said.

The Windfall Films company, he said, had approached them last year about filming the dissection of a big shark.

"The plan was to initially fly a shark to England for the dissection, but those plans fell through," he said.

However, the company had still been keen to film a dissection.

"When this shark was caught, we transported her to our base on a trailer, and coincidentally the film company had called us a day or two before the shark was caught," he said.

The film company hired local camera and sound assistants for the filming, which was set in Mossel Bay.