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October 10, 2007

He Sleeps With The Fishes: Another Juvenile Great White Shark On Exhibit In Monterey

I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.
      - Peter Benchley

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has successfully put a young great white shark on exhibit for the third time in history. Earlier in the fall, the young male shark was put into the 1.2 million gallon Outer Bay exhibit, where the public can watch him at their leisure. And he can watch them.

I enjoy going to watch the behavior of the white sharks the aquarium has displayed almost as much as I like watching the people who are there to see the shark. Most of the time, parents seem to be telling their kids that one of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is the great white shark. Or one of the scalloped hammerheads. Another favorite is thinking the dolphinfish (mahi-mahi) is the great white.

Luckily, most kids can tell a great white from a mile away, just like they can ID a brontosaurus. Still, this is the only chance most people will ever have at encountering a live great white shark.

The other fish species in the tank clearly know what the apex predator is. They give him a very wide berth. Executing sharp turns to avoid him within the giant tank. Anyone who has seen the tank behavior enough without the shark can tell there's a certain layer of tension amongst the other fish and turtles when they have a white on exhibit.

He arrived on August 28, and will remain in the million-gallon exhibit as long as he's in good health and hasn't grown too large for us to return safely to the wild.

Like our first shark in 2004, he was caught accidentally in commercial fishing gear. Like our second shark in 2006, he's a young male: just 4-feet, 9-inches long and weighing 67 ½ pounds. As with both of the other young white sharks, he was kept in an ocean holding pen off Malibu in Southern California until we observed him feeding and navigating well in the confines of the pen.

Our first shark was with us for 6 ½ months; our second, for 4 ½ months. Both were successfully returned to the wild, and the tracking tags they carried documented their journeys back in the ocean. We've tagged 10 other young sharks in the wild in Southern California waters as part of our white shark field project, and support research to track the migrations of adult white sharks tagged off the Farallon Islands and Point Año Nuevo on California's central coast.

More At: Monterey Bay Aquarium White Shark Exhibit

The aquarium has been able to do a lot of behavioral research on young whites, of which very little is known, and has successfully returned the previous juvenile great whites to the wild and tracked them.

Posted by sorsha at October 10, 2007 9:14 AM