15-foot tagged shark stumps experts by leaving Carolinas for ‘uncharted waters’
Great white sharks are creatures of habit, but satellite tracking shows one of the larger East Coast sharks has abandoned its seasonal turf off the Carolinas and headed south “into uncharted waters,” OCEARCH researchers say.
It remains a mystery where 15-foot Breton is going and why he’s going there.
It’s also unclear why his tracker is still transmitting data, since it is past the 5-year lifespan for tag batteries, officials said.
“Just over a week ago, he was northeast of the Bahamas, but his latest location tells a very different story,” OCEARCH wrote in a March 30 Facebook post.
“On March 29, Breton’s tag pinged approximately 104 miles off Grand Turk Island, in the southeastern Turks and Caicos. This is the southernmost location ever recorded for an OCEARCH-tagged white shark from the western North Atlantic population in the West Indies region.”
Breton, an adult male, was tagged off Nova Scotia in September 2020, and has since traveled 50,347 miles. Tracking maps show he spends much of his time off the Carolinas, where the northbound Gulf Stream and southbound Labrador Current collide.
Breton was off Wilmington, N.C., on Christmas Eve when he suddenly shifted 250 miles off the coast and began traveling south along the Continental Shelf.
“His offshore movements in particular have been especially intriguing. We observed a recurring pattern of Breton shifting from offshore to inshore waters in December, a movement he has made in consecutive years,” OCEARCH says.
“Could this be related to mating? Well, we’re not sure at this point.”
Breton was 13-feet, 3-inches and 1,437-pounds when first tagged, but OCEARCH estimates he is now nearly 15 feet long.
Great white sharks frequently travel north in the summer and south in the winter, a habit experts suspect has to do with preferring more temperate waters. It’s also possible they are pursuing migrating prey, researchers say.
OCEARCH is a nonprofit shark research organization that tags and releases great white sharks to track their movements and collect data on their habits.