[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5poHfnS1kMA&[/youtube]
The first rigorous scientific estimate of white shark numbers in the northeast Pacific Ocean suggests there are far fewer white sharks off central California than biologists had expected.
The details reported in the journal Biology Letters offer the best estimate among the world’s three known white shark populations (the others are in Australia/New Zealand and South Africa).
“This low number was a real surprise,” says University of California, Davis doctoral student Taylor Chapple, the study’s lead author. “It’s lower than we expected, and also substantially smaller than populations of other large marine predators, such as killer whales and polar bears.
The researchers went out into the Pacific Ocean in small boats to places where white sharks congregate. They lured the sharks into photo range using a seal-shaped decoy on a fishing line. From 321 photographs of the uniquely jagged edges of white sharks’ dorsal fins, they identified 131 individual sharks.
From these data they used statistical methods to estimate that there are 219 adult and sub-adult white sharks in the region. (White sharks are classed as sub-adults when they reach about 8-9 feet in length and their dietary focus shifts from eating fish to mostly marine mammals. They are adults when they reach sexual maturity—for males, that is about 13 feet long; for females, it is about 15 feet.)
“We’ve found that these white sharks return to the same regions of the coast year after year,” says study co-author Barbara Block, a Stanford University marine biologist and a leading expert on sharks, tunas, and billfishes. “It is this fact that makes it possible to estimate their numbers. Our goal is to keep track of our ocean predators.”
Read it all here at Futurity.
Leave a Reply