The White Shark Café is a remote mid-

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

area noted as a winter and spring habitat of otherwise coastal

great white shark The great white shark (''Carcharodon carcharias''), also known as the white shark, white pointer, or simply great white, is a species of large Lamniformes, mackerel shark which can be found in the coastal surface waters of all the major ocea ...

s. The area, halfway between

Baja California Baja California, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California, is a state in Mexico. It is the northwesternmost of the 32 federal entities of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1952, the area was known as the North Territory of B ...

and

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...

, received its unofficial name in 2002 from researchers at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

Hopkins Marine Station Hopkins Marine Station is the marine laboratory of Stanford University. It is located south of the university's main campus, in Pacific Grove, California (United States) on the Monterey Peninsula, adjacent to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It is h ...

who were studying great white sharks by using satellite tracking tags. They identified a zone with a radius of approximately centered at approximately . The findings, which were initially published in the January 3, 2002 issue of the journal ''Nature'', showed three of four tagged sharks traveled to the Café during a six-month period after they were tagged off the central coast of California. Although the area had not previously been suspected as a shark habitat, when mapping the satellite tracking data, researchers discovered that members of the species frequently travel to and loiter in the area. It was once believed the area had very little food for the animals (researchers described it as the shark equivalent of a

desert A desert is a landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions create unique biomes and ecosystems. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to denudation. About one-third of the la ...

), but research in early 2018 by the vessel ''Falkor'' showed that there is a rich and diverse food chain too deep to be detected by satellites that provides a potentially abundant food supply for the sharks. Male, female, and juvenile great whites have been tracked there. The sharks tracked to the area came from diverse

rookeries A rookery is a colony of breeding rooks, and more broadly a colony of several types of breeding animals, generally gregarious birds. Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds of colony-for ...

along the

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

n coast. They typically took up to 100 days to arrive, traveling around , during which they make periodic dives as deep as . While at the Café, they dive to depths of as often as once every ten minutes. By 2006, researchers had observed consistent migration and other behavior. Tracking data indicates that white sharks will leave feeding grounds near the coast in winter, travel to the Café, and some may even summer near Hawaii. But many linger in the Café, often for months, before returning to the coast in the fall, coinciding with the

elephant seal Elephant seals or sea elephants are very large, oceangoing earless seals in the genus ''Mirounga''. Both species, the northern elephant seal (''M. angustirostris'') and the southern elephant seal (''M. leonina''), were hunted to the brink of ...

breeding season (a favored prey).

Notes

Sources

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direct PDF link

External links

Voyage to the White Shark Café
website for the 2018 expedition aboard ''Falkor''
Tagging of Pacific Predators: White Sharks
part of the

Census of Marine Life The Census of Marine Life was a scientific initiative involving a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations, engaged to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. The census cost US$650 milli ...

White Shark Cafe - The Film
a documentary about the White Shark Café {{DEFAULTSORT:White Shark Cafe Pacific Ocean Sharks