Hammerhead Shark Gives Birth on Florida Shore [VIDEO]

In Panama Beach, Fla. swimmers and sunbathers witnessed a bizarre scene Monday when a hammerhead shark gave birth to a litter of pups on the water's edge.

The circumstances of exactly why the shark was on the shore were unclear, but in a video a man can be seen dragging the 5-foot-long hammerhead to shore. It appears the man was fishing and may have hooked the shark and dragged it to shore to get his hook back.

"Fishing is a legal activity. Unfortunately, he did catch a hammerhead shark, and I'm just assuming that he was attempting to pull him back onto the shoreline and retrieve the hook," St. Andrew State Park Manager Brian Addison told local news station WMBB.

As a crowd of onlookers gathered around the flailing hammerhead, it began to give birth, delivering a number of wriggling pups on the shore. Many of the pups seemed to swim away, but attempts to guide the mother shark back to sea were unsuccessful. The mother shark died despite multiple attempts to coax her back to sea, WMBB reported.

"It appears that it was in great distress at that time, and after several attempts, they were unsuccessful in trying to get the shark to swim back into open water," Addison said.

As the video shows, shark pups are independent and instinctively swim away after they are born. They receive no further nourishment from the mother and tend to remain in shallow waters where there are fewer predators than in the open sea.

Great Hammerheads give birth to 20-40 pups, though other species of hammerhead generally give birth to a litter of 12-15 live pups.