Great White Sharks Eye-to-Eye! Location: Guadalupe Island, MEXICO 11 am Day 2c by Wayne & Karen Brown

Holding our cameras at the ready we sway slightly inside the cage. (We are going to ask for more weight on our weight belts so we can stand firm inside the cage and not get pushed around by the water movement.) We are happy to see the the distance (visibility) we can see underwater is very good! We can see over 100 feet! On our Australia Great White Shark Expedition our underwater visibiity was only less than 50 feet!

We only have to wait about a minute before a big Great White Shark seems to materialize out the blue ocean water and appears to investigate the fish the Shark Wrangler have thrown into the water near our cage.

As the shark investigates the floating fish the Wrangler pulls away the fish! With the fish gone the Great White Shark notices us in the cage and swims right toward our cage!

The shark doesn't attack our cage. It just slowly swims along the front of our cage inspecting us as it swims by. As the shark swims by we can tell his shark is a young male shark by the finger-like claspers that stick out from its two pelvic fins on the underside of its body!

Apparently the curious activity from this shark has attracted the other sharks in the area! Soon we have four Great White Sharks swimming around our cage and in and out of view!

There is regular constant shark activity all around us!

As we watch the sharks swim by we can tell by their size that these sharks are both young and old. The smallest sharks are around 12 feet long and the largest are over 17 feet long! We also notice that these sharks are both male and female! This is interesting because Great White Sharks are generally solitary and only gather when there is abundant food and mating! So in addition to the seals we saw on shore this place must be one of the few places scientist know of where the Great White Sharks mate!

The Great White Sharks swim by to check us out and occasionally one will then try to snatch one of the fish that the Shark Wranglers have near our cage. Some sharks casually swim up to the fish, near the surface, to smell and and inspect it more closely before trying to grab it. These sharks try to grab the fish and seem surprised when the fish disappears from their open jaws. Some sharks see the fish getting pulled away and kick it into overdrive and leap towards the retreating fish which they may or may not successfully grab, depending on how quick the Shark Wranglers are at pulling in the fish! The sharks most successful at grabbing the fish seem to be the older, more experienced sharks. These sharks swim up rapidly from below and are able to grab the fish before the Shark Wranglers even saw it coming!

This type of behavior of rapidly ambushing prey from below is a common predatory behavior that has been seen with Great White Sharks around the world. This type of attack works well for Great White Sharks because they are not able to maintain a fast swimming speed for very long. One quick attack from below usually surprise the prey and probably immobilizes it so it can't get away. With the prey immobilized the Great White Shark can then swim back at its normal slow speed and feed on the prey. Because we are seeing this behavior in the older sharks and not the younger sharks this seems to indicate that this is a learned behavior and not an instinctive one. Maybe, as they get older, Great White Sharks try different methods of catching prey and then stick with the ones that work best for them.

45 minutes in a cage was not really enough time for us and it seems our time was up before we know it! Fortunately for us some people only wanted to go into the cage once or wanted to take some time out for lunch so so we were able to spend all the time in the cages that we wanted to until it was the end of the day!

We ended our day with lots of video footage from all the Great White Sharks we saw throughout the day! We could identify all different Great White Sharks we saw by their their scars or differences in the shading patterns on their bodies. We counted at least four different Great White Sharks that visited us today, both males and females! (This is A LOT BETTER than the Great White Shark experience we had on our Australia Great White Shark Expedition! There we did not see a Great White Shark until early in the morning of our second day at anchor. Even though we saw that shark several times during the day that was the only shark we saw on our whole five day expedition!)

We look forward to tomorrow's shark encounters!

other expeditions  |  kids' page  | contact us