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Pair of recently-tagged great white sharks make way to Florida

Miss Costa the great white shark. Photo by OCEARCH.org

Two of Ocearch’s latest recipients of satellite tracking equipment have already pinged in off the coast of Florida less than two months after being tagged off the coast of New England.

Grey Lady and Miss Costa, a pair of female great whites, were tagged within two days of each other in September off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and immediately began a southern migration to the warmer waters of the south Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Grey Lady, a 12.5-feet, 1,300-pound female, pinged in — or surfaced long enough for the tracking tag to transmit information  to the satellite — on Dec. 14 approximately 35 miles offshore of Jacksonville.

Miss Costa, which measured 12.5 feet and weighed in at over 1,600 pounds, appeared headed for the Gulf of Mexico after she was reported in the Dry Tortugas in the Florida Keys on Nov. 29.

Both sharks were captured tagged and released on Ocearch’s 27th expedition as part of the organization’s ongoing scientific mission to collect data for keystone marine species such as great white and tiger sharks through the use of tags that can be tracked online in real time.

According to the tracking data, a third great white shark from that research expedition, Yeti, an 11-foot, 960-pound female, could join them in Florida very soon. Yeti last pinged in on Dec. 11 off the coast of Savannah, Georgia.

Since the study began, the annual migration of great white sharks to the warm waters off the coast of Florida has shown that the behavior is much more common than previously thought. In 2014, Katharine, a 14-foot, 2,300-pound female, 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 Atlantic side in 2015 and again earlier this year off the coast of Daytona.

You can follow the OCEARCH tagged sharks 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.