After going off the grid for nearly nine months, Katharine the great white shark is making up for lost time. The 14-foot female’s satellite tracking device has pinged in three times in the last week roughly 70 miles off the coast of Melbourne.
Earlier this year, OCEARCH researchers feared that the battery in Katharine’s satellite tag, which generally have a self life of around five years, had finally run out after she was last recorded surfacing deep in the Atlantic in January. The shark pleasantly surprised researchers after she pinged in again in September off the coast of North Carolina. The one-ton sub adult has been regularly pinging in since then as she made her annual trek south.
Katharine and several other OCEARCH-tagged great white sharks are regular visitors to the Sunshine State during the winter.
In 2014, Katharine became OCEARCH’s first Atlantic great white shark to migrate past the Florida Keys into the Gulf of Mexico, even making it as far north as Tampa Bay before heading back into the Atlantic. She returned to the coast Atlantic Coast of Daytona in each of the past three years. Katharine has traveled over 35,000 miles since being tagged and released off the coast of Cape Cod in 2013.
White shark @Shark_Katharine is spending #BlackFriday off the coast of Florida. She pinged in today east of Palm Bay. It’s the same area she spent the winter in last year. pic.twitter.com/G0TjI9Iz4t
— OCEARCH (@OCEARCH) November 23, 2018
Katharine is one of OCEARCH’s best known sharks that it has tagged thanks to the its Twitter account, curated by Florida Today columnist Rob Landers, which boasts over 56,000 followers.
You can follow the OCEARCH tagged sharks, including those from last month’s Nova Scotia expedition, by accessing the near-real time, free online Global Shark Tracker, by downloading the Global Shark Tracker App available for Apple and Android platforms, or by following OCEARCH on all social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.