According to new research published March 23 in the journal Biology Letters, scientists may have discovered the secret social life of great white sharks. One team said that while tracking multiple great white sharks, some of them stuck together while patrolling the area around Guadalupe, such as stopping to check the island's seal colony, sometimes for more than an hour. The reason they wander in groups may be simple, and these sharks may have found that when they work as a team, they can hunt larger prey.
But how exactly did these researchers stumble upon this revelation? Yannis Papastamatiou, a marine scientist at Florida International University and lead study author, said they wanted to learn more about the great white sharks that gather around Guadalupe Island every year. The waters around the island are teeming with tuna and seals, making it a buffet destination for sharks.
To study them, the team made a "super social tags." This tag allows them to track sharks. In addition, each label contains a small camera to capture video clips. These "labels" show them acceleration, depth, direction, and even the speed at which sharks turn around while swimming. More than 30 great white sharks on the island have been flagged by previous research expeditions, giving researchers more opportunities to see their "super social tags" at work, as the new "hashtags" can also detect other great white sharks with "tags" nearby.
The new label is designed to collect data for up to five days. Then, by the end of those five days, the label would pop off the dorsal fin and float to the surface of the water for the researchers to collect. Over a four-year period, the team tagged a total of six great white sharks, with females and half males each.
After analyzing the data collected by the "super social tag," the researchers found that some sharks patrolled the island in droves. In most cases, they prefer to be with their peers of the same sex. But in terms of their social skills and behavior patterns, there are large individual differences between different sharks.
Most interactions are very short, generally no more than 7 minutes. Some sharks, however, choose to stay together and hunt together for more than an hour. For example
Of the individuals the researchers observed, one of the great white sharks was marked for only 30 hours, but it interacted with more than 10 other great white sharks in that short period of time (shebo?
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The other was marked for 5 days and only spent time with two other great white sharks (social fear?).
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This data on the secret social life of great white sharks is a huge step in understanding how these marine predators live.
The tracker also allowed the researchers to see the sharks' different predation habits. For example, some great white sharks prefer to hunt in deeper water, while others stay in shallow water. What's more, some choose to hunt at night and others during the day.
Videos of shark hunting also show multiple attempts by prey to get rid of sharks. This is not unusual, as predators are not always able to catch their prey when hunting. The waters of Guadalupe Island are very blue and very clear, and the great white shark is easy to see the prey, but at the same time the prey is also easy to see the great white shark lurking nearby, so the success rate of the great white shark hunting is not high.
Papastamatiou notes that this may help prove why great white sharks sometimes congregate together. He has studied the social life of black-tailed sharks in the past and found that social performance improves their ability to use other sharks to hunt successfully, so now scientists believe that the great white shark near Guadalupe Island may be the same situation.
But in the end, there's still a lot we don't know. Technology may have given us a glimpse into the secret social life of great white sharks, but we're still not sure why these sharks choose to socialize. Hanging out together may just be a way for great white sharks to share information, and they may not be hunting cooperatively.
The researchers said that although the sample size of the study was small, it also proved that great white sharks are forming non-random social associations. Perhaps in the future, great white sharks can be tracked for a longer period of time, such as weeks or even years.
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