Great white sharks are hugging the Carolina coast, researchers say. Here’s why
Great white sharks are hugging the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, enjoying cooler water pushed against the southeastern seaboard, researchers say.
Many white sharks migrate in the winter from the North Atlantic to the waters off North Carolina and South Carolina, according to researchers.
Ocearch, an organization that tags big sharks and tracks them with GPS, said on Twitter, “Most of the white sharks pinging on the Tracker now are utilizing the cooler water trapped between the coast and Gulf Stream.”
Satellite images show the warm water of the Gulf Stream pushing cooler water up against the coast.
“There is a lot of Tracker activity off the coast of Myrtle Beach right now. 3 white sharks have all pinged there in the last few days. They’re tucked in a sliver of cooler water trapped between the coast and Gulf Stream,” Ocearch said on Twitter Tuesday.
Ocearch’s Shark Tracker website shows nine big white sharks tracked recently to the southeastern coast. The biggest shark that pinged in the area recently is a 12-foot-6-inch shark named Hal who weighs in at 1,420 pounds and surfaced off the coast of Georgia in late December.
Researchers have tracked Hal since September 2018 and watched him migrate from Nova Scotia in the summer to the southeast coast in the winter.
The tagged sharks concentrating in the area means there are a lot more great whites than just those nine with GPS trackers.
“The heavy concentration of our adult and near-adult white sharks in this region suggests it’s an important winter habitat,” Ocearch said.
“The body of colder water trapped between the Gulf Stream and the coast is a key feature of this region,” said Bryan Franks, a marine scientist at Jacksonville University who works with Ocearch.
“This ‘wedge’ of cold water extends from the Outer Banks in North Carolina down to Cape Canaveral in Florida. This feature results in a range of water temperatures in a relatively short horizontal distance from the coast out to the Gulf Stream. In addition, there is the potential for abundant prey in the migrating populations along the coastlines and in the dynamic mixing zone on the Stream edge,” Franks said in an Ocearch blog post last year.
