Miss Costa the great white shark. Photo courtesy of OCEARCH.org
With water temperatures plummeting throughout their usual habitats, great white sharks sightings off the coast of Florida have been plentiful recently. The behavior has become a regular occurrence for the species as they seek the warmer water and ample feeding grounds of the Sunshine State.
Savannah, a 460-pound female shark that was tagged as part of Ocearch’s Global Shark Tracker program, pinged off Port St. Lucie on January 9.
Miss Costa, a 12-foot 5-inch, 1,668-pound female, pinged in just offshore of the Florida Keys in December and has been making her way up the Gulf coast of Florida, reaching the coast of Clearwater before returning to southernmost keys. Her most recent location put her near the Dry Tortugas on Jan. 8. This is the second straight year the shark has returned to Florida after taking a similar path at this point last year.
When you realize the Florida Keys 🌴 is the place to be! @OCEARCH @ChrisOCEARCH @CostaSunglasses #MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/X3DASdt43A
— Miss Costa (@MissCostaShark) January 8, 2018
George, a 9-foot 10-inch, 700-pound male, was also detected in the same area. Both sharks were originally tagged off the coast of Nantucket in 2016. Hilton, a 12 1/2-foot, 1,300 pound male, could be joining the trio after he was last tracked off the coast of Jacksonville heading south on Jan. 11.
Since the Ocearch study began, the annual migration of great white sharks to the warm waters off the coast of Florida has shown that the behavior is much more common than previously thought. In 2014, Katharine, a 14-foot, 2,300-pound female, became OCEARCH’s first Atlantic great white shark to migrate past the Florida Keys into the Gulf of Mexico, even making it as far north as Tampa Bay before heading back into the Atlantic. She returned to the Atlantic side in 2015 and again in 2016 off the coast of Daytona.
Another great white was spotted off Jupiter Inlet by a charter fishing boat on January 3. The shark did not appear to have a satellite tracking device.
“When I looked down from the bridge, I said ‘Holy crap! It’s a great white!'”the ship’s captain Glenn Cameron told TCPalm regarding the encounter. “It had to be 18-20 feet long. When it’s tail was about even with my stern, the pointed head was up even with the middle of the salon. And it’s width was probably three-quarters of the width of my boat’s cockpit. It was probably 2,000 pounds. It didn’t even care that we were there. It just kind of looked up at us with that big black eye.”
Great whites aren’t the only sharks making an appearance this time of year. Cold weather has helped push smaller species of sharks closer to shore, including a bull shark spotted just feet from shore in Nokomis.
You can follow the OCEARCH tagged sharks by accessing the near-real time, free online Global Shark Tracker, by downloading the Global Shark Tracker App available for Apple and Android platforms, or by following OCEARCH on all social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.