Featured Image Credit: Liberty Voice
By: Alice Morris
Think you’re a great white shark expert after binge watching Shark Week? Think again. Despite the great white shark’s fame, we still have a lot to learn about this top predator.
With the development of a new video camera, researchers hope to gain insight into one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the great white.
White Shark Café
Every year during the fall and winter, great white sharks living along California’s Central Coast migrate to a remote spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii.
Nicknamed “White Shark Café,” there is very little food or plant life here. In fact, there is very little of anything here, so it is often referred to as an ‘ocean desert.’ And yet large groups of white sharks flock to this spot every year, leaving behind the sheltered California coast to seek out this seemingly random spot in the middle of the ocean.
Photo Credit: Source
Once there, the sharks begin diving repeatedly towards the ocean floor, sometimes reaching depths of 3,000 feet.
So what’s happening at the café?
“We don’t know what’s going on out there,” said Sal Jorgensen, a Monterey Bay Aquarium senior research scientist. “It could be somewhere where you might get a bite to eat or it might be where you meet somewhere special. It’s kind of like Burning Man for white sharks. You’ve got all these sharks in the Bay Area heading out to this desert area, and we don’t know exactly what they’re doing out there, but they go every year.”
Many scientists support Jorgenson’s theory that the sharks gather here to mate or to feed on some unknown food source. But to get a better idea, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have developed a highly specialized camera that attaches to the dorsal fin of a shark.
The “shark cam” will monitor this mysterious migration and give researchers the inside scoop on life at the White Shark Café.
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Engineering a camera that’s tough and smart
Building a camera that can survive for months underwater and sustain dives of over 3,000 feet without harming the shark is no easy feat, but MBARI engineer Thom Maughan was up to the task.
“Some of the engineering team said it was an impossible job, but I’m attracted to those opportunities,” said Maughan about the project.
In addition to withstanding the physical challenges of an underwater environment, the camera also had to be smart enough to only film while at the White Shark Café, and then to detach from the shark’s fin once back near the California coast so that researchers could locate it and collect the data.
Monterey’s researchers have already tested the camera in the Farallon Islands and South Africa, deploying it on sharks for one to five days at a time. The real test however will come once the camera is deployed for the full nine-month journey to the café and back.
Hopefully the shark cam will provide us a glimpse into the secret life of the great white shark and the mysterious White Shark Café.
For now, we’ll just have to satisfy our great white cravings by watching Shark Week reruns.