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No, don't worry, this isn't going to be an article that aims to create needless fear of Great Whites, more a look into some new research that shows their hunting patterns are not random, or based solely on where the food is. They're a lot more similar to humans than you'd dare imagine.
 Great White Feeding New research headed up by Neil Hammerschlag from the University of Miami, Florida has given evidence for hunting patterns previously unknown in Great White sharks. Neil's team used geographic-profiling techniques, which are usually used by police forces around the world, analysing the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area of offender residence. Geographic profiliing has proved itself successful over the world in determining the residence of serial killers and more recently, by biologists to uncover the location of bee-hives by tracing the movement of bees.
Tracking Great White Movements
Until recently, very little was known about the hunting habits of Great Whites, except that they tend to perform well in low-light conditions, with many attacks happening at dusk time and older sharks seemed to benefit from their years of experience, being more successful hunters. To being the study, Neil's team set up camp off the coast of the Great White capital of the world, South Africa. From this point they would tag and track the location of over 300 Great White sharks and study their feeding habits on the local Cape fur seal population. The collected data was fed into the geographic profiling computer model which suggested that the attack points were not random, but each shark had "anchor points" which they would launch attacks from. Hammershlag commented: "This wasn't where the seal concentration was greatest,", suspecting a balance existed between prey detection, competition with other sharks, and environmental conditions that let them launch a quick vertical attack where the water is clear enough to see the seals. Larger, older sharks also seemed to have more defined anchor points than younger sharks. "This could mean two things. Sharks could refine their hunting with experience. It could be that as they get older, the sharks learn which are the best hunting spots," says Hammerschlag. Alternatively, the larger sharks could be deliberately excluding the smaller sharks from the best hunting spots, leaving them to take their chances elsewhere. This kind of research can be used to improve our understand of sharks and how they feed and lead to reducing unwanted interaction between swimmers and sharks. |
