Like some oceanic rockstar, a Great White Shark named Katharine (Katherine the Great anyone?) has collected quite the fan base on her current East Coast tour. Over the past 2 months a flurry of national and worldwide news reports and social media updates followed her as she silently cruised offshore of major cities and tourist-heavy beaches in Florida.
Tagged off of Cape Cod on August 20, 2013, by Chris Fischer and his scientific-based research organization OCEARCH, Katharine, a 14 ½ ft long, 2,300lb female Great White, now carries a satellite transmitter on her dorsal fin. When Katharine’s fin breaks the surface of the water a signal is sent from the transmitter to an orbiting satellite. The satellite then records the general geographic location of that device, which is now affectionately referred to as a ‘ping’.
Katharine’s pings are what have given this predatory fish her growing fame, not just in the scientific community but in the pop-culture world as well. In a brilliant mix of sharing scientific knowledge and almost paparazzi-like fanfare, OCEARCH shares her location with the world via Facebook and Twitter everytime Katharine pings. Her entire historic journey, all 4,200 miles, has been mapped out for the first time, giving researchers insight into the mysterious behavior of Atlantic Great White Sharks.
It has also given the general public an unlikely celebrity to follow – and follow her they do. Katharine has her own Twitter account (@Shark_Katharine), run by OCEARCH, and she boasts nearly 10,000 followers!
These days it seems almost cliche to mention the movie JAWS when talking about Great Whites. However, it can be argued that the film did catapult these sharks into the spotlight and forever embed a mental soundtrack every time people enter the ocean. Unfortunately, like any great horror movie should, it scared the audience and left only negative publicity in its wake. Since the film was released 39 years ago, any interaction between humans and great whites, from actual attacks to harmless sightings, incites a media feeding frenzy and reinforces humanity’s primal fear of the unknown.
This fear of the unknown undoubtedly leads to a certain public fascination in regards to Great White Sharks, reinforcing the hype around Katherine’s journey. While she stayed, on average, between 1 and 10 miles offshore, this Great White diva also made several highly publicized detours to shallow inshore waters near heavily populated areas.
Her journey went public when she pinged 6 times directly off the coast of Sebastian Inlet in central Florida, most pings a mere hundred yards from the beach. This set off a flurry of cautionary tweets and updates from OCEARCH advising beachgoers that they had a visitor! Around that same time, a GoPro video went viral showing a spear-fisherman’s close encounter with a juvenile Great White Shark on a nearby reef.
Was it Katharine making a dramatic encore? No one knew for sure if Katherine was the shark in the GoPro video, but that didn’t stop the media from giving her credit for the surprise performance. The two appearances proved to be too much of a coincidence for the general public and whether it was Katherine or not, this Great White was now famous.
As her coastal cruise of the Florida peninsula continued, she headed south, pinging several times off of Stuart, then Boynton Beach, and then Boca Raton. Even though most pings were from miles off the coast, by the time she paralleled Ft. Lauderdale, news stations kept their local and nationwide audiences captivated as they anticipated Katharine’s next appearance.
In an almost Hollywood-like plot-twist, she went quiet for two days. After 48 hours of radio silence, Katherine made global headlines and set off a whirlwind of major news network reports as she pinged inshore near South Beach and Miami. She would end up cruising to downtown Miami and through an area of dense shipping traffic, then to the shoreline off of Key Biscayne, and then circling the rest of the Florida Keys.
On May 27th, at 4:27pm, a public safety warning from OCEARCH was issued for Key West via social media. Katharine was just offshore near the reefs in the southern point of the island. Soon after, local snorkel rental shops would thank their lucky stars that Katherine decided to swim far out into the Gulf of Mexico and away from human habitation.
By this time, Katherine was a scientific goldmine of information. It has long been known that Great Whites were in the Atlantic, in fact, according to scientists, they’ve been there for millions of years. As a species they are generally rare, but there are several Great White hot-spots known to be densely populated such as South Africa, Australia, and the pacific coast of North America. Those areas tend to get the most media attention and prevail as areas that can support a Great White Shark eco-tourism industry. Until recently, the same could not be said for the Atlantic.
Perhaps due to the conservation efforts and subsequent regulations that have helped rebuild the populations of large marine mammals such as whales and seals, which are the main food source for an adult Great White Shark, we are seeing more and more Great Whites in the Atlantic. The Cape Cod area, which ironically enough, was the setting for JAWS, is also the area where Katharine was originally tagged. This area has seen a major spike in the amount of Great Whites over the past 10 years, which most people attribute to the booming seal populations. These blubbery seals would definetly be the energy-rich fuel that Katharine used in the initial stages of her trek from Cape Cod to the Gulf of Mexico, a truly massive undertaking.
But why travel so far? What’s her motive and what’s her reason for going where she’s going Without being too anthropomorphic, it certainly seems like she knows what she’s doing. Her headline-inducing inshore pit stops along the Atlantic Great White Highway were most likely feeding detours for fish, dolphins and even manatees. Yet she swam right back out to sea ago continue her journey into the Gulf of Mexico, a trip that has likely been made by many Great White Sharks for millions of years.
This trip is so special because for first time in those millions of years, we get to follow along. Katharine has become a rockstar and we her devoted roadies. Even if her fame is short lived, she paved the way for possible future conservation efforts and gives us a glimmer of hope that everything we’re doing to protect these apex-predators is working.
Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, we’re starting to rethink the Great White Shark. Evidence of this paradigm shift is most obvious in the social media comments on Katharine’s Twitter and Facebook updates where loyal fans from all over the world offer words of encouragement and voice concerns for her safety. It certainly seems like the fascination is overcoming the fear! That’s good. That is exactly what needs to happen to save Katharine and her kind.
In closing, the most fascinating thing about Katharine’s ascension to fame is that all of this is occurring completely unbeknownst to her. Thanks to the groundbreaking research from Chris Fischer and OCEARCH, we are getting to watch Katharine’s life story play out. Is she pregnant? Is the Gulf of Mexico a Great White nursery? Hopefully, with all the data she generates she can help in answering these million-year-old questions.
For now, as her audience, we can only sit back and watch this educational and entertaining drama unfold. We can’t wait to see what else this now legendary shark will teach us or where she’s going next, but she’s sure to make the front page wherever that may be. Speaking of which, although she’s still miles and miles offshore, her latest ping shows her moving northeast in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s already a feature story in a newspaper in Tampa welcoming her arrival.