A massive great white shark named Ironbound has been tracked just off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.
Ironbound is one of the marine animals tracked by ocean research organization OCEARCH. He measures 12 feet, 4 inches long, and weighs 1,189 pounds.
On May 10, his tracker pinged in the waters off from the Georgia/South Carolina border, with his previous pings placing him further out in the ocean on April 17, near the Bahamas on April 12, and off the coast of Fort Lauderdale and Miami in Florida in January.
The OCEARCH tracker shows that before January, Ironbound had been swimming south along the East Coast, having been pinged in Canadian waters in October 2022. Having swum south for the winter months, Ironbound is clearly making his way north once again.
Great white sharks are found across the world, usually only within temperate regions. They tend to grow to maximum lengths of 20 feet, and weigh up to 5,000 pounds.
Most great white sharks swim up and down the U.S. East Coast with the seasons, traveling north during the warmer months, then south again during the colder winters.
White sharks Ironbound and Maple have officially left the Gulf of Mexico to begin their journey north. They are currently off the east coast of Florida between Melbourne and Port Saint Lucie.We met...
"Most, but not all, species of highly mobile sharks in the Northern Hemisphere move southward in the winter as they are following their food," Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, previously told Newsweek.
"Indeed, food availability drives a lot of animal movement. Sometimes sharks move inshore to drop pups if they are live-bearing or egg cases, if they lay eggs, to provide a more secure environment for their young."
Not all sharks follow this pattern exactly, though, as they are less sensitive to water temperatures, and more so for the availability of their specific prey.
"We often see white sharks move down from Canadian waters to Florida. However, this is not a 'hard and fast' rule," Naylor told Newsweek in October 2022. "White sharks are quite large and, as a result, have considerable thermal inertia. This means they don't 'warm up' or 'cool down' as much as would smaller animals, so temperature per se is less of a driver of movement than is food availability. If you look at multiple white shark tracks in the Northwest Atlantic, you will see that they are all over the place."
Ironbound in particular was first tagged by OCEARCH in 2019 off the coast of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada. Since then, the shark has traveled 15,145 miles—the equivalent distance of Los Angeles to London, three times over.
OCEARCH tracks a number of other marine animals, including turtles, dolphins and seals, and can see their location when the animal surfaces the water, allowing their tracking device to ping.
They track these animals to get a sense of their behavior in the wild, as well as take blood and tissue samples during the tagging to study their reproductive cycles, diet, and the presence of plastics and parasites.
This is important for the conservation of these shark species, many of which are threatened: great white sharks are classified as "vulnerable," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. It is estimated that populations of these sharks have declined by between 30 and 49 percent over the past few hundred years, mostly as a result of human actions like overfishing and plastic pollution.
Great whites are elusive creatures, so OCEARCH's tracking has allowed them to find out more about this species' behavior.
"OCEARCH's unique scientific process of collaboration across many disciplines in the field has dramatically increased the rate of data collection to help us better understand, protect, and manage white sharks in the Western North Atlantic," OCEARCH said in a Facebook post on May 1. "With up to 25 research projects taking place on each animal we tag, this white shark puzzle has gone from one of least understood populations in the world to one of the most understood."
Do you have an animal or nature story to share with Newsweek? Do you have a question about great white sharks? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
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Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
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