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Katharine, a great white shark over 14 feet with a Twitter following, appeared again off the east coast of the United States this week. A transmitter attached to its dorsal fin hadn’t sent a definitive message for a year and a half.
The transmitter that was attached off Cape Cod in August 2013 is about half the size of an iPhone and is meant to ping every time the shark breaks the ocean’s surface.
Great whites can hold out for long periods without surfacing. Katharine made it off the coast of South Carolina in May 2019, according to a map maintained by Ocearch, the group that follows her. This spring, Ocearch She said he thought Katharine might have been heard from “about 200 miles off the coast of Virginia”.
But on Monday, the group said it was definitely registered, hundreds of miles from the same state.
In a post on the Ocearch Facebook page, Dr Bryan Franks of Jacksonville University wrote: “Katharine is alive and well … Katharine pings more yesterday, confirming that it wasn’t a fluke.”
The tags used on Atlantic white sharks “normally only send us data for five years,” Franks said, meaning it was “very unusual for us to hear a shark for this period of time, and that’s exactly the kind of data. that we are trying to help put the pieces of the puzzle together or his life and more [north-west] Great Atlantic white sharks like her.
“Katharine has shown movement patterns indicative of being a reproductively mature female white shark with travel during some winters in the open sea.
“His tracks over the past seven years up and down the coast from Cape Cod to Florida and with long forays to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic offshore, can cover the movements of two or three pregnancy and birth cycles of her puppies.
“It has already provided an incredible dataset with more than 1,700 locations, covering 37,000 miles of ocean since the day it was tagged. It will be fascinating to see where his next moves might be. “
Some have criticized Ocearch’s use of social media to advertise their work. Others point out that it raises the profile of a vital conservation effort.
Katharine is named after Katharine Lee Bates, the 19th century lyricist who wrote America the Beautiful. After the shark resurfaced at a bad time for American democracy, his Twitter account started tweeting again.
“You miss me?” Katharine asked her 62,000 followers, adding, in reference to the coronavirus pandemic: “So everyone knows YES I was wearing a mask when I came.”
In response to a user who suggested she resurfaced in time for the presidential election, she wrote, “I mean. I was chasing a fish, but I’ll roll on it. “
On Friday, with the election result stuck in a midnight zone of vote counting and guerrilla warfare, he added: “Are you sure to get back up? You’ll have a crazy week up there. “
In fact, Katharine isn’t the most popular big white on Twitter. An account for a shark named Mary Lee has 132,000 followers. According to Ocearch, its transmitter hasn’t pinged since June 2017.
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