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marmar

(77,162 posts) Sun Apr 7, 2024, 11:21 AM Apr 7

Great White Sharks Would Like the Gulf of Mexico Back, Please

(Texas Monthly) Like plenty of Texas spring breakers, LeeBeth opted for a trip to the beaches of South Padre Island in recent weeks. But while the sun, the sand, and the promise of a fat margarita might have drawn others, LeeBeth was driven by something else entirely: an ancient animal instinct still scarcely understood by scientists.

LeeBeth is a shark—of the great and white variety—whose more than two-thousand-mile trip to the Gulf of Mexico earned her the spotlight this month, in part because of the sheer length of her journey, but also because a great white shark had never been tracked that far west. Megan Winton, a research scientist with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, says that when it comes to tracking sharks, LeeBeth, who clocks in at fourteen feet long and weighs well over two thousand pounds, is sort of the ultimate catch. And Winton would know—she was on the boat as part of the team that caught and outfitted LeeBeth with several types of tags in December of last year.

The tracking devices only ping researchers with a shark’s location when the fish’s dorsal fin breaks the surface for at least 45 seconds. Often a tagged shark will go weeks or months without sending a record of its locale. But LeeBeth seems to like things up top and has broken the water’s surface more frequently than other tracked sharks, providing scientists with an unusually clear map of her travels and invaluable insight into her kind’s migratory patterns. Winton also says LeeBeth is a crucial piece of the white shark research puzzle because she is a large, mature female, of which researchers have tagged relatively few in the North Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s in part because it takes them a long time to get that big,” Winton said. “The ocean’s a tough place to make a living. It’s really exciting from that perspective.” ..............(more)

https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/great-white-sharks-gulf-of-mexico-record-leebeth-south-padre-island/