How did a 14-foot shark vanish for 18 months? Stranger still: Why did it come back?
Satellite tags make it tough for large sharks to disappear completely, but that’s just what happened 18-months ago in the case of a 14-foot great white shark being tracked off Charleston, South Carolina.
One day it was there, and the next day — poof — it was gone.
However, what’s even stranger is the fact the same shark showed up again last week, off Virginia’s Wreck Island Natural Area Preserve.
The nonprofit OCEARCH isn’t sure what happened during that 18-month blackout, but the bigger mystery is why the tracker attached to 2,300-pound Katharine is still working after seven years.
“This is a record for our Atlantic SPOT-tags, that normally only send white shark data to us for about five years,” Dr. Bryan Franks of Jacksonville University said in an OCEARCH Facebook post. “Katharine pinged in multiple times ... confirming it was not a fluke.”
The surprising return of Katharine is a big deal, in part because the predator has an international following. Her Twitter account — under the name “Katharine The Shark” — has nearly 62,000 followers and her Facebook page has nearly 10,000 followers.
Katharine was tagged in August 2013 off Cape Cod, making her among the earliest and best known sharks being studied by OCEARCH. Researchers suspect she may have grown by as much as 3 feet since then, putting her at around 17 feet.
Tracking shows Katharine traveled 37,519 miles in those seven years, from Newfoundland to as far southwest as the Gulf of Mexico, where she lingered off the Florida Panhandle.
Her last recorded “ping” (appearance on satellite tracking) was at 10:04 a.m. on Nov. 7, the tracker shows.
OCEARCH has learned much from Katharine, including “winters out into the open ocean” that hinted she was pregnant, according to the Facebook post.
“Her tracks over the past seven years up and down the coast ... may cover the movements of two or three cycles of pregnancy and birth of her pups,” OCEARCH officials wrote. “It will be fascinating to see where her next moves may be.”
OCEARCH has been studying white sharks in the Northwest Atlantic since 2012, and among its goals is to learn where they mate and give birth. It is also studying the impact sharks have on preventing other species, including seals and squids, from depleting East Coast fish stocks.
In October, the organization made international news when it caught a 17-foot, 2-inch great white shark off Nova Scotia. The shark weighed 3,541 pounds and is the largest white shark tagged in the Northwest Atlantic, OCEARCH reported. Experts believe the shark was 50 years old, OCEARCH told McClatchy News.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 2:56 PM with the headline "How did a 14-foot shark vanish for 18 months? Stranger still: Why did it come back?."