Huge 13ft Great White Shark 'Bob' Pings Just Off Chesapeake Bay

A 13-foot-long great white shark dubbed "Bob" has been tracked off the coast of Virginia, near to Chesapeake Bay.

According to Bob's OCEARCH tracking map, the shark has been steadily traveling south along the U.S. east coast, with previous pings being recorded off the New Jersey coast on October 21, and off Cape Cod in Massachusetts on September 22. Bob's latest ping was on October 23, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.

Great white sharks can be found all over the globe, mostly spending their time near the coastlines of temperate regions. They can grow to lengths of up to 20 feet, and 5,000 lbs in weight.

Off the U.S. east coast, tracked great white sharks have been observed to migrate with the seasons, generally swimming southwards towards Florida during the winter months, and north towards Nova Scotia in the summer.

"Most (but not all) species of highly mobile sharks in the Northern Hemisphere move southward in the winter as they are following their food. Indeed, food availability drives a lot of animal movement," Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, told Newsweek.

"We often see white sharks move down from Canadian waters to Florida. However, this is not a 'hard and fast' rule. 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."

Bob only made it as far north as Cape Cod in 2022 but was tagged off the Canadian coast in late 2021. Other OCEARCH-tracked sharks are scattered up and down the coast, with the 1,200lb Ironbound pinging in the Gulf of Maine, and Ulysses being tracked to the waters off Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

OCEARCH is a non-profit organization that tags sharks and other animals, including seals and dolphins, in order to research the species. On tagging expeditions, OCEARCH researchers capture the sharks using hand lines, tag the animals, and take blood and tissue samples to study such factors as reproductive cycles, diet, plastics, and parasites. The sharks are placed in a continuous flow of water from a hose for the duration of this process to keep their oxygen supply high and the animals calm.

Great whites are classified as "vulnerable" according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, with a population decline of 30 to 49 percent over the past few centuries. This is thought to be mostly due to the actions of humans, with overfishing, plastic pollution and other contaminants killing thousands of the sharks.