Last Wednesday morning, as eight Monterey Bay Aquarium biologists and administrators sat behind a draped table answering questions from reporters, a 4-foot 4-inch-long juvenile great white shark in the aquarium’s million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit gulped 113 grams of salmon proffered to her on a feeding pole.
At the news that their new charge had eaten, the scientists nearly came undone with joy and relief.
“Well, we have a historic moment here,” Vice President of Husbandry Randy Hamilton exulted to the crowd upon receiving word of the shark’s accomplishment. “I’ve just learned that apparently she’s already fed on exhibit. It’s an unbelievable event—it’s never happened in history!”
Since her introduction on Sept. 14, the 62-pound female Carcharodon carcharias has eaten a pound to a pound-and-a-half of salmon a day and navigated the tank with no trouble from the giant Pacific bluefin tunas, the tank’s scalloped hammerhead sharks or any of the other animals.
“It’s terrific news to us,” the Aquarium’s Randy Kochevar told the Weekly on Monday. “The fact she is feeding at all tells us this animal has acclimated to this setting. And the fact that we can feed her when we want to opens up all kinds of things. Yesterday we gave her a vitamin. We could give her medicine if we needed to.”
Husbandry History
A healthy great white shark is the holy grail species of aquariums the world over. Great whites do not survive in captivity; most refuse food and wind up back in the ocean or dead. One notable exception, a 6-foot female caught in Australia in 1968, began feeding on her tankmates and was killed after showing undue interest in the tank divers. In all she lasted 10 days. The record is 16 days, set by Sea World in San Diego in 1981.
Twenty years ago this month, just before the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s grand opening in October 1984, a 4-foot 10-inch female was caught off Bodega Bay and transported to Monterey. She failed to eat and died after 10 days.
The key to the success of this shark, who has not been and will not be named, is a newly developed “halfway house” concept, according to the aquarists. After she was accidentally snared in a commercial fisherman’s gillnet off Malibu on Aug. 20, she was put into a 120-foot-wide, 4 million-gallon open ocean pen where she lived for three weeks growing accustomed to captivity and to being fed by the aquarium team. On Sept. 14 she was loaded into a 3,000-gallon transportation tank on the back of a flatbed truck for the six-hour journey to Monterey.
Her arrival was much anticipated. In 2001, the aquarium had launched a multi-year white shark research project in southern California, tagging yearling sharks to track their migration patterns in an attempt to bolster conservation efforts. As apex predators that are slow to reach sexual maturity, great whites are under severe pressure due to the overfishing of their food chain and the incidental netting of their pups. The aquarium has long wanted a great white shark to serve as ambassador for marine ecosystems and to counteract the grisly image perpetrated by Jaws and reinforced by annual reports of attacks on surfers.
“It will give people a chance to say, ‘I saw a shark in a tank acting normally, not in an iron cage with movie lights,’” says California Academy of Sciences Chair of Aquatic Biology John McCosker.
This individual’s future at the aquarium depends on her appetite, her rate of growth and her behavior toward her neighbors. Great whites can reach a length of 20 feet, too big even for the Outer Bay exhibit (although a 9-foot, 10-inch sevengill shark named Emma thrived in it for four years starting in 1990). Or she could start preying on other animals, something the aquarium is hoping will not happen as long as feedings are regular and sufficient.
First, though, her caretakers have to get her through this week.
“We’re very reassured by what we’ve seen thus far, but given what we’ve seen with other white sharks, a celebration would be premature,” Kochevar said. “A few weeks down the road, after she’s continued eating and doing well, maybe then we’ll breathe easier.”