Great White 'Secret' Sex Spot Found?

Aug. 6, 2007 — Thanks to its status as one of the world's top predators, great whites are among the best known sharks on Earth, yet essentially nothing is known about their mating habits.

That could soon change, as researchers have discovered a remote spot in the eastern North Pacific that great whites may be a mating ground, according to a recent paper in the journal Marine Biology.

At first, scientists nicknamed the region, 1,553 miles west of the Baja Peninsula, the "great white café" because they suspected sharks could go there to feed. But, as lead author Kevin Weng explained to Discovery News, there is a potential wrench in that theory.

"It's just not an area that a shark would logically go to from California to find something to eat," said Weng, a researcher in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

"No seals or sea lions are there," he added, "and it's not a hot area for whales either."

The feeding theory has not been ruled out, nor has the possibility that the site serves as a breeding ground. Some intriguing evidence, in fact, suggests great whites could gather there to mate.

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Weng and his team analyzed satellite telemetry information gathered from three tags that were attached to great whites. The tags revealed the sharks migrate long distances seasonally from the coast of California to Hawaii and to the offshore area.

During the migration they occasionally dive 3,000 feet or more, possibly to "read" geomagnetic, compass-like information emitted from Earth's crust. At the remote spot, however, the sharks dive more often. On average they dive every 10 minutes, 1,000 feet down.

Weng thinks the sharks could be searching, and "sniffing," for mates.

He said smells in the ocean are layered horizontally.

"So if you dump any kind of odorous thing into the ocean — an apple pie, a dead horse, or a female shark — its fragrance will end up within a horizontal plane," he explained. "When the sharks repeatedly dive, they could be passing up and down through these layers...(for) olfactory cues."

Great white shark life could fall into food "boom and bust" periods, Weng said. Sharks gather at marine mammal rookeries in California during autumn and winter months. There they feed on the abundant elephant seals and other prey before migrating to the offshore waters.

Shark ecologist Salvador Jorgensen, a member of the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics team, has not ruled out the "cafcafé" scenario.

He said the remote spot could still be "a place where you might go to get a bite to eat."

Jorgensen, however, quickly added, "Or, you might go there to meet a person of the opposite sex. It's a little ambiguous what you're doing there."

Weng said travel to the remote shark spot will cost at least around $20,000 a day, but he is hopeful future expeditions may solve this great white mystery.

GreatWhite.org

Behavior, feeding and habitat.

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