Aquarium Lands Another Great White Shark

September 4, 2006

Release from: Kevin Howe
Monterey County Herald (California)

MONTEREY – "Jaws" returns!

Monterey Bay Aquarium has placed a great white shark on exhibit for the second time in its Outer Bay aquarium tank.

The young 5-foot-8-inch, 104-pound male shark was caught by hook-and-line gear in Santa Monica Bay on Aug. 17 by aquarium collectors, kept in a 4-million-gallon ocean pen off Malibu, and brought to Monterey on Thursday in a 3,000-gallon mobile life support transport vehicle, according to Jon Hoech, husbandry curator for the aquarium.

After the big fish was seen feeding in the ocean pen he said, it was considered fit to travel.

The aquarium exhibited a female white shark for 198 days from Sept. 15, 2004, to March 30, 2005, before releasing it back into the wild.

The Outer Bay exhibit was designed specifically to accommodate pelagic –’ open-ocean –’ animals. It is home to Galapagos and scalloped hammerhead sharks, as well as bluefin tuna weighing 400 pounds or more, yellowfin tuna, barracuda, sea turtles, ocean sunfish and other open-ocean species.

Once turned loose in the tank, even fish four times the shark’s size got out of its way.

Dr. Mike Murray, aquarium veterinarian, noted that when the white shark first began swimming around the tank, a hammerhead shark swimming in the opposite direction approached it head-on, "then turned around and split. It was remarkable how fast it went."

He and Hoech described the new white shark as "a baby," less than a year old.

The first white shark coexisted with the other animals until February 2005, when it killed two soupfin sharks in the tank. On March 28 of that year, aquarium biologists saw clear signs that her behavior had changed and she had begun actively hunting other sharks. They returned her to the wild three days later.

No other white shark held in captivity survived so long in an aquarium. The previous record was 16 days.

During that time, more than 1 million visitors saw the shark circling in the Outer Bay tank –’ nearly 30 percent more visitors than normal. That unexpected boost in attendance prompted trustees of the nonprofit aquarium to provide an additional $500,000 –’ for a total of $840,000 since 2002 –’ for field studies of juvenile and adult white sharks, according to aquarium spokesman Ken Peterson.

"We’re thrilled to have a white shark here again," said Cynthia Vernon, vice president of the aquarium’s conservation program.

Because of the last shark, she said, "a lot of people’s attitudes and thinking about sharks changed."

Last fall, researchers funded by the aquarium placed electronic tags on 29 adult white sharks off the Farallon Islands and Point Ano Nuevo, Calif., said Barbara Block of Stanford University, a marine biologist and principal investigator with the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics Project.

That doubled the number of sharks being monitored in the ocean, she said, noting that from 1999 to 2004, 29 others had been tagg

Data from the tags are offering new insight into the far-ranging travels of white sharks in the eastern Pacific, Block said.

"They go from coastal waters to the open sea to what we call the White Shark Cafe and back."

Since 2002, the aquarium, through its White Shark Research Project, has worked to learn more about white sharks in the wild and to bring one to Monterey for exhibit, Peterson said.

During that time, aquarium staff members have tagged and tracked seven juvenile white sharks off Southern California –’ animals either collected by staff biologists or obtained from commercial fishing crews who caught them accidentally.

The shark can also be viewed online via the aquarium’s streaming Outer Bay Web cam from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily at www.montereybayaquarium.org.

White sharks are in decline worldwide, according to marine scientists, in part because they’re slow to reproduce and because of growing fishing pressure that is decimating all shark species. White sharks are now a protected species in California and other U.S. coastal waters, as well as in South Africa, Australia, Mexico and other nations.

In October 2004, white sharks were granted additional protection by the 166 nations that are parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna.