1/7/2024 0 Comments Whiteshark airtool![]() The biggest white shark ever recorded was caught in 1939 and it was 21 feet long and weighed 7,300 pounds. They average 15 to 16 feet in length, but can grow much larger. The trade in shark parts - mainly jaws and fins - is also illegal internationally under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Great white sharks, known scientifically as Carcharodon carcharias, are protected under state legislation that makes it illegal to fish for them. The rest only transmitted their location or were not recovered. The researchers got data from 10 of the 22 tags that floated up and signaled the Falkor that they had detached and were bobbing around ready to be collected, an exercise that Jorgensen called “a white shark treasure hunt.” The scientists also obtained recorded information on shark movements and behavior over the previous months from six other great whites through radio uplinks. Last fall, before departure, her team of scientists tracked down 36 local sharks using acoustic signals and fitted them with high-tech satellite monitoring tags with locator beacons programmed to pop off and float to the surface during the cafe expedition. To find out, Block organized the monthlong expedition in April and May aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor, which was equipped with high-tech instruments, sail drones and a remotely operated submarine. She named it the White Shark Cafe even though she wasn’t sure whether the sharks went there for food or sex. She also tracked their movements into San Francisco Bay and around Guadalupe Island, in Mexico.īut then, each December, the acoustic tags showed a mass movement out to sea that was as confusing to the researchers as it was surprising.īlock found that the sharks were leaving the food-rich waters along the West Coast to spend spring and most of the summer in a patch of open ocean about the size of Colorado, a place that looked in satellite images like an empty, oceanic Sahara desert. ![]() The researchers’ focus, a 160-mile-radius subtropical region about 1,200 nautical miles east of Hawaii, was essentially unknown to science until marine scientist Barbara Block, of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, began attaching acoustic pinger tags to white sharks 14 years ago.īlock discovered that the local sharks, known as northeastern Pacific whites, feed on elephant seals and other marine mammals in the so-called Red Triangle, between Monterey Bay, the Farallon Islands and Bodega Head, from about August to December. “They are telling us this incredible story about the mid-water, and there is this whole secret life that we need to know about.” ![]() “The story of the white shark tells you that this area is vitally important in ways we never knew about,” said Salvador Jorgensen, a research scientist for the Monterey Bay Aquarium and one of the expedition’s leaders. The primary lure, scientists believe, is an extraordinary abundance of squid and small fish that migrate up and down in a little understood deep-water portion of ocean known as the “mid-water,” a region skirting the edge of complete darkness that could provide an immeasurably valuable trove of information about the ocean ecosystem and climate change. Courtesy Salvador Jorgensen Show More Show Less 3 of3 (GERMANY OUT) Great White Shark, Carcharodon carcharias, USA, California, Pacific Ocean, Farallon Island, San Francisco Bay (Photo by Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images) Reinhard Dirscherl / Ullstein Bild Show More Show LessĪ scientific mission into the secret ocean lair of California’s great white sharks has provided tantalizing clues into a vexing mystery - why the fearsome predators spend winter and spring in what has long appeared to be an empty void in the deep sea.Ī boatload of researchers from five scientific institutions visited the middle-of-nowhere spot between Baja California and Hawaii this past spring on a quest to learn more about what draws the big sharks to what has become known as the White Shark Cafe, almost as if they were pulled by some astrological stimulus. Courtesy Salvador Jorgensen Show More Show Less 2 of3 Salvador Jorgensen, a research scientist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, tags a shark off the coast of California. 1 of3 Salvador Jorgensen, a research scientist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, tags a shark near the Farallon Islands.
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