Great White Sharks Visiting San Francisco

Ponca City, We love you writes "Juliet Eilperin writes in the Washington Post that while for years, humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore, it turns out we were wrong. Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach satellite tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts to track the sharks and discovered that Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February, foraging among elephant seals, sea lions, and other prey. The sharks were spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge. 'It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,' says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block. The fact that 'a major concentration' of great whites can ignore humans 'shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,' says Salvador J. Jorgensen."

really??

[timmarhy]

It's always been common knowledge that great whites come in close to shore, after all their food source lives on the beach. The summary and TFA make it sound like some great revilation that sharks go where their prey goes.... hell here in australia there's a few attacks each year.

A classmate of my sister

[Alpha830RulZ]

Several years back, an acquaintance of my sister was sea kayaking off of Northern California with her boy friend. They came up missing. They found one of them, I forget which, drifting, dead of blood loss, in the two kayaks which were lashed together. The one they found was missing large chunks of body. The other person was never found. While the sharks seem to mind their own business most of the time, the few exceptions are killers.

Re:A classmate of my sister

[hondo77]

By "several" I think you mean "twenty" [listphile.com] and by "Northern California" I think you mean "Malibu".

California surfers have known this all along

[al0ha]

The large shadows I've seen and strange unaccounted for splashing noises I've heard over the years, while out in winter surf, which sparked spooky feelings, are definitely something; and something big. Sometimes they are dolphins, but other times, when you don't see a dolphin, man does the hair stand up on the back of your neck....

Re:uh

[skelly33]

As any serious California surfer will tell you, a great white in the water where you are at is bad news - "leave them alone" is no consolation to people who are out in the water and get bitten, and sometimes killed. They cannot be safely dismissed out of hand. They are wild, aggressive hunters that do not think. We all know that the whites come in to feed during the winter - that has always been the case. Shark attack incident logs alone make that clear.