3rd Trip of our 2013 Guadalupe great white shark season on the Nautilus Explorer and I can say that last two days has been the best diving I have ever had on my 3 years at Guadalupe. 6 different sharks on 1 dive! Hard to beat that one huh? But now we are on our […]
Read MoreDr. Mauricio Hoyos writes in his article: “Cookiecutter sharks (Isistius brasiliensis) are known to attack a wide array of large animals including pelagic fishes, cetaceans, and pinnipeds. Here we add another top predator, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), to the list of potential victims”. At Guadalupe Island you can very often spot […]
Read MoreInteresting note from Mauricio Hoyos, our very, very excited Mexican shark scientist friend on station on Guadalupe: for only the second time in four years, a predatory white shark event was witnessed. It happened just before we arrived. Chicka, a huge and beautiful female great white shark, captured an elephant seal and literally bit it’s head off. This apparently started quite a sequence of events including some very aggressive fighting over the carcass between the sharks (maybe that’s why we are not seeing many sharks today?). Mauricio was quite close to the event in his panga (skiff) and was able to capture everything on video. In fact on two different occasions during the feeding, sharks literally attacked Mauricio’s panga. He later commented that never before has a 22ft fiberglass panga felt so flimsy!! This is indeed a very interesting development.
Read MoreGreat white sharks are considered to have “adaptive intelligence” and learn lessons as they try out new behaviour – a trait which is presumably very useful to an apex predator. Adaptive intelligence seemed to be at work here as this white shark learned that he could “sneak up” on the throw lines without the wranglers on the back deck seeing him. That is, until he brushed up against a sacrificial zinc on the hull of the Nautilus and scratched himself, which in turn seemed to end his experimentation with this new type of behaviour.
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