FAMOUSLY HUGE...

[samhexum]

Famously Huge Great White Shark, ‘Deep Blue,’ Feasts on Dead Sperm Whale in Hawaii

 

Shark experts were thrilled to see the iconic shark in Hawaii this week.

 

A decaying sperm whale carcass has been floating in Hawaiian waters since Thursday, drawing in schools of hungry tiger sharks. But compared to the scene’s newest visitors, they look positively puny.

 

On Sunday, divers spotted a famously huge great white shark named “Deep Blue” feeding on the whale near Oahu. The rare sighting was reported by HawaiiNewsNowbased on footage shot by local divers.

 

“If you asked me a few days ago what the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in Hawaiian waters the answer probably would be pretty different,” freediver Kimberly Jeffries, who first saw the shark, wrote on Facebook.

 

“If you asked me yesterday the answer would be freediving with Deep Blue, a great white, the largest ever documented, who was last seen in 2013 in Mexico,” Jeffries added.

 

In a Facebook post, fellow diver Mark Mohler said at least three great whites were visible, and that Deep Blue could only be seen on Sunday.

 

"Based on photos I can confirm there have been three distinct females recorded over the past few days," Jeffries told Motherboard in an email.

 

Deep Blue became an icon several years ago during Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, though her remarkable size and age—roughly 20 feet long and 50 years old, according to many media reports—are up for debate.

 

Her sensational reputation as the “biggest” shark on record can be attributed to

(shot in 2013) in which Mauricio Hoyos Padilla, director of the shark nonprofit Pelagios-Kakunjá, and others filmed the large female near Mexico’s Guadalupe Island. In 2015, Padilla wrote on Facebook that she was “the biggest white shark ever seen in front of the cages in Guadalupe Island,” which somehow became“the largest great white shark ever caught on film.”

 

Deep Blue is indeed very large, but shark researchers can’t say for sure that she’s the largest.

 

“I lead the white shark research project at Guadalupe Island and first documented Deep Blue in 1999, 20 years ago,” Michael Domeier, president and executive director of the Marine Conservation Science Institute, told Motherboard in an email.

 

“The claim that she is the largest white shark in the world is just a Discovery Channel gimmick,” Domeier added. “Deep Blue has never been measured, so how could anyone make that statement?” (He cited =68.ARB5g1pazUl6ynMpwGnZ6j_SapLFAuISiWq6e3dCYHTfBP2CpUq53KKkjDLs4fYPFSgrkHybfYOhTZB6Cyo6s1HbzhW75Q4OKPIZbg1fTz3PS4ETC2HpbrCaOPEhje9MGmFkhyERNEU62Cg9A6Yqhcp5XNRoFJqxlLpCjOvF6fnRvxFj5iQfLGkeUzzcqMeQDF02mt_-NUBV5dVhuNdvFveOjCfq_7tfJl-x2pgYtJQNWwDruUCcr52cMmD1ezkNJDfAnIpWx4xLDQBhI47GlCrGOfysyMut5xKXtiz63DHjkYdA_SNF1VFrKxsdcAY6I1Bn_uoxFSxWSLC_vOBy-l_KDA&__tn__=-R']another huge shark approaching Hawaii named “Murphy Jean,” described as “massively girthy/fat.”)

 

As for Deep Blue’s age, Domeier said we can only estimate.

 

“Deep Blue was an adult when we first encountered her 20 years ago,” Domeier said. “So she is likely at least 40 years old, possibly older. Unfortunately the only way to accurately age a white shark is to kill it and look at the rings on the vertebrae, but no mystery is worth solving at that price!”

 

The shark’s measurements were similarly questioned by George Burgess, director emeritus at the Florida of Natural History’s Florida Program for Shark Research.

 

“It’s a big girl,” Burgess told Motherboard over the phone. “Looks like maybe 18 feet. Hyperbole is part of Shark Week so you gotta be worried about some of the facts.”

 

So is the shark in Hawaii really Deep Blue? Domeier and divers say yes.

 

Mohler wrote on Facebook that the identity of Deep Blue was confirmed “with the white shark authority, SharkPix.com,” a repository of shark photos managed by hobbyist wildlife photographer George Probst who works with researchers to ID great whites.

 

Great whites possess unique pigment patterns that are commonly used to identify them.

 

“The line of demarcation between the white color on the underside and the grey color on the upper side is like a fingerprint,” he explained. “We particularly look at the pattern of demarcation near the gills, the pelvic fins and the caudal fin (tail).”

 

Great whites are a rare sight in Hawaii, but they’re not unheard of; their presence iseven documented in Native Hawaiian ceremonial objects. Satellite tracking data suggests that most originate near California and Mexico, and that female sharks will roam the deep while pregnant before returning to the coast to give birth.

 

Domeier theorized that Deep Blue may be one of these pregnant sharks. “She has likely been at sea since the late fall of 2017, [for the gestation period,]” he speculated. “She will give birth to 8 to 12 pups this spring, and then return to Guadalupe Island in the fall to mate and start the cycle over again.”

 

Burgess agreed that she could be pregnant. Or perhaps Deep Blue’s belly is simply a food gut. Maybe she’s “fartin’ like mad,” he added.

 

On Saturday, local and federal authorities towed the sperm whale 15 miles offshore after it drifted onto a reef. People have been asked to stay away from the carcass. Signs now warn beachgoers that “whale material” could be in the area.

 

Both Domeier and Burgess discouraged thrillseekers from diving with the sharks.

 

“Most of the time, that shark won’t turn around and bite you,” Burgess said.

 

“But when it does, you’ll end up as a statistic on the International Shark Attack File, and the news headline won’t be ‘Stupid human dies chasing a 20 foot shark,’” Burgess added. “It will be ‘Shark kills human,’ and that activity is very bad for conservation efforts.”

[samhexum]

Why sharks aren’t as bad as ‘Jaws’ makes them out to be

 

William Lytton, a 62-year-old neurologist from Scarsdale, vividly remembers the moment a great white shark bit down hard on his left thigh.

 

“It hurt pretty bad,” he tells The Post. “I didn’t realize at first what was happening. But then I looked down and saw all the blood and thought, ‘Oh, geez, this isn’t good. I’m in dire straits here.'”

 

It happened last August, just 10 feet off the shore of a small beach in Truro, Massachusetts.

 

Lytton had gone out for a quick swim in the Atlantic, as he often does during the summer, when the great white attacked him.

 

“It wasn’t as dramatic as it seems in the movies,” he says. “I didn’t hear the ‘Jaws’ theme or anything.” But it was terrifying, and he punched frantically at the shark’s gills to free himself.

 

Lytton managed to escape, but the power of the shark’s jaws ripped apart the tendons in his thigh.

 

“It didn’t hit a main artery, which is probably why it didn’t kill me,” he says.

 

He swam to the shore without losing consciousness and after being airlifted to Boston, was placed in a medically induced coma for two days while undergoing a dozen surgeries.

 

“I was mostly worried that I might lose the leg,” Lytton recalls. “I was grateful to be alive, especially given what happened to the other guy.”

 

The “other guy” was Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old surfer from Brazil who died after a great white attacked him off a Cape Cod beach just weeks later. It was the first fatal shark attack in Massachusetts in more than 80 years.

Stories like this might make some New Yorkers uneasy about getting back into the water again this summer, especially with recent shark activity that’s gotten a little too close for comfort.

 

Just days before Memorial Day weekend, a great white shark named Cabot — he’s been tagged with an electronic tracker and has around 12,000 followers on Twitter — was spotted swimming around Long Island. He wasn’t the first great white to venture this close to the area, but he was one of the biggest.

 

At 533 pounds and 9-foot-8-inches long, Cabot wasn’t quite as big as the great white in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie “Jaws” — he was roughly half the size of that fictional shark — but was still massive enough to rattle beachgoers.

 

Yet Gavin Naylor, the director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s shark-research program, says the danger isn’t quite as imminent as it may seem.

 

“Great whites have long been entering Long Island Sound,” he tells The Post. We just haven’t been aware of them because most sharks aren’t tagged. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he says.

 

The odds are in our favor. In the US, there’s a 1 in 265 million chance of being killed by a shark.

 

The risk is even lower if you live in New York state. Since 1837, there have been just 12 unprovoked shark attacks, plus 15 attacks in New Jersey. But the real reason we shouldn’t be fearful of sharks isn’t the fact that they attack so infrequently.

 

It’s that their reputation as the so-called killers of the sea might be undeserved. Peter Benchley, the author of both the 1974 novel and original screenplay adaptation of “Jaws,” noted during a lecture at the Smithsonian during the ’90s that, if he was writing the same story today, he wouldn’t be able to “portray the shark as a villain, especially not as a mindless omnivore that attacks boats and humans with reckless abandon.”

 

Instead, he said, the shark “would have to be written as the victim.”

 

This peculiar idea is what prompted William McKeever, an author and conservationist, to take a closer look at the ocean’s most misunderstood creature. In his new book, “Emperors of the Deep” (HarperOne), out Tuesday, he explores how sharks have more to fear from us than we do of them.

 

“And unlike our fear of them,” he writes, “their fear is justified.”

 

Sharks, he argues, are less intent on making a meal of us than we’ve led ourselves to believe. “They’re not interested in us,” McKeever told The Post.

 

“We’re not on the menu.”

 

We don’t have the nutrients they need. “Sharks eat mammals that provide lots of blubber, like seals and sea lions.”

 

That blubber fuels a shark’s liver, and our scrawny human bodies just don’t have enough of that vital blubber to make us worth a meal.

 

So why do shark attacks on humans happen at all? Because sometimes mistakes happen, McKeever says. A shark biting into a human is like a human accidentally biting down on a birthday candle when eating a piece of cake.

 

“They’re not happy about it,” he says. “There’s no actual nourishment there.”

 

A bigger issue, according to McKeever, is the brutality inflicted on sharks at the hands of humans.

 

“While sharks kill an average of four humans a year, humans kill 100 million sharks each year,” he writes. (This is according to a 2013 study by the peer-reviewed journal Marine Policy.)

 

They’re killed by accident (as a byproduct of the $40 billion tuna industry) and intentionally — sharks are regularly harvested for their meat, skin, fins, liver and cartilage — as well as for sport.

 

McKeever visited a shark-hunting tournament in Montauk and saw crowds of onlookers line up “like spectators in the Roman Colosseum to catch a glimpse of a shark’s bloody, mangled body.” He even saw one fisherman carve the heart out of a dying shark and bring the still-beating heart over for the crowd to see.

 

He went out on a hunt with a Montauk shark fisherman named Stan, a heavyset man in his 50s who was never without a cigarette or a cup filled with liquor, and watched him battle with a mako shark, pulling it onto the boat and severing the shark’s spinal cord with a harpoon.

 

“Blood oozed out of the incision, and the shark twitched,” McKeever writes, “its life slowly ebbing away.”

 

McKeever admits that he grew up, like many of us did, with fears about man-eating sharks. “Every book I picked up portrayed them as killers,” he writes. “A character would go swimming in a movie, and a shark would come along and take his leg off.”

 

Our cultural anxiety about sharks dates back to 1916, when five people were attacked by a shark on the Jersey Shore and only one survived. It made national headlines, spawning the beginning of coast-to-coast shark paranoia and federal aid to “drive away all the ferocious man-eating sharks which have been making prey of bathers,” according to a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

Ever since, many Americans don’t feel comfortable even wading in an ocean without scanning the surface for signs of a dorsal fin.

 

While doing research for “Emperors of the Deep,” McKeever decided to face his fears head-on. With the help of marine scientists and professional shark divers, he ventured into the natural habitats of four shark species — mako, tiger, hammerhead and great white.

 

“When you’re in the water with them, you start to realize that sharks are basically just big dogs,” McKeever says of his experiences. “They’re like a German shepherd or a husky. You just have to be careful.”

 

He also discovered that they have personalities with more depth and nuance than just mindless eating machines.

 

He learned of a secret spot in the Pacific, halfway between the Baja Peninsula and Hawaii, which has earned the nickname the White Shark Café.

 

“The visibility of the water out there is some of the best on the planet,” McKeever says. “One theory for why they migrate there is that it’s an opportunity for them to check each other out.”

[samhexum]

[continued]

 

The female great whites assess the male sharks, specifically their fins and muscle tone, and the males show off their strength and stamina with “bounce dives,” descending to depths of up to 15,000 feet below the surface.

 

There’s no unique food resource that would keep the sharks coming back to this area. The only reasonable explanation, McKeever says, is that it’s become a “Burning Man for Sharks.”

 

He also learned that many sharks, despite their reputations as lone hunters, can be social creatures. Though great whites and tigers rarely travel in packs, smaller species like lemon sharks stick together, especially younger males. “If you’re a young male lemon shark, you’ll hang out with other young males,” McKeever says.

 

Some of it’s about survival. “They’ll hide together to escape predators like barracuda,” he says. “But it’s also a social thing. They become like buddies.”

 

McKeever’s mission, he says, is to help people stop wasting psychic energy worrying about sharks.

 

“That should be the last thing on your mind,” he says. “If anything, you should be thinking about what’s going to happen on the car ride home from the beach. What you’re going to face on the roads is far more dangerous than what’s in the ocean.”

 

Lytton, for one, agrees. Despite nearly losing a limb to a shark, he’s ready to get back into the ocean this summer.

 

“I tried getting in just the other day, but my wife said, ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ ” Lytton laughs. “She wouldn’t let me!”

 

Sooner or later, he’ll be swimming again. Just maybe not at the same Truro beach where he was attacked last year.

“If I got bit again in the same place, that’d be really embarrassing,” he says.

 

SHARK SHOCKERS!

Amazing facts about the ‘Emperors of the Deep’

• You’re 10 times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a shark.
  
• Sharks lose and regrow from 30,000 to 50,000 teeth in a lifetime.
  
• Ninety-three percent of all documented shark attacks since the 16th century have been on boys and men.
  
• According to a 2017 study, sharks become less aggressive and more inquisitive when listening to songs by the band AC/DC — specifically, “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).”
  
• Baby sharks are born with a full set of teeth, so they’re never fed by their mothers. They come out ready to hunt and sometimes eat their siblings in the womb.
  
• Sharks are attracted to the low-frequency sound of a dying fish, otherwise known as a “yummy hum.”
  
• The world’s biggest shark, the now extinct megalodon, was 65 feet long — about the size of a semi-trailer truck.
  
• Strangest things found in sharks’ stomachs: bottle of wine, cannonball, an entire chicken coop, birth-control pills, a dog leash, a bag of money, a fur coat, a porcupine.