In March 2013, OCEARCH caught and tagged a 14.5-foot shark named Lydia off the coast of Jacksonville. It was one of the two sharks to provide data for the study. Photo by R. Snow/OCEARCH.
HYANNIS – Researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington have found that great white sharks like to dive deep into warm-water whirlpools in the Atlantic.
The recently published study in “Nature Scientific Reports” looked at the movements of adult female white sharks in the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Ocean.
The results show they prefer the warm eddies, or clockwise-spinning whirlpools, over the colder ones which spin the opposite direction and bring nutrient-rich water up from the deep ocean.
The study analyzed the movements of two female great whites tagged by OCEARCH, one off Cape Cod in 2012 and the other off Jacksonville, Florida in 2013.
Researchers took data from the two sharks and compared their position in with sea-surface height data from satellites which showed where the large warm- and cold-water eddies were located at that time.
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