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Great White Sharks Visiting San Francisco
Ponca City, We love you writes "Juliet Eilperin writes in the Washington Post that while for years, humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore, it turns out we were wrong. Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach satellite tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts to track the sharks and discovered that Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February, foraging among elephant seals, sea lions, and other prey. The sharks were spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge. 'It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,' says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block. The fact that 'a major concentration' of great whites can ignore humans 'shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,' says Salvador J. Jorgensen."
... and there was no mention of laser beams (frickin' or otherwise), so move along now.
jaws?
welcome our San Francisco Bay shark overlords
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Am I'm the only one that misread "foraging" as "fraging" ?
[Scene: A New York apartment. Someone knocks on the door.] Woman: [not opening the door] Yes? Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Arlsburgerhhh? Woman: What? Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Johannesburrrr? Woman: Who is it? Voice: [pause] Flowers. Woman: Flowers for whom? Voice: [long pause] Plumber, ma'am. Woman: I don't need a plumber. You're that clever shark, aren't you? Voice: [pause] Candygram. Woman: Candygram, my foot. You get out of here before I call the police. You're the shark, and you know it. Voice: Wait. I-I'm only a dolphin, ma'am. Woman: A dolphin? Well...okay. [opens door].
Love the first paragraph in TFA that points out the obvious: "For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore."
Holy shit. I always thought "For years, elephants have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore."
I just learned something today. Guess I thought I knew more about elephants than people. I am sadly mistaken.
here's a typical shot of a great white in san francisco bay:
http://www.empireonline.com/features/golden-gate-bridge-in-movies/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Quick... someone blame global warming!
It's to blame anytime anywhere something in the vaguest sense weird happens. WE NEVER HAD ANYTHING WEIRD HAPPEN BEFORE GLOBAL WARMING. EVER.
Call Al Gore - him staring pensively at great whites will make a great opening to Inconvenient Truth 2 - Revenge of the Evil People Who Didn't Buy Hybrids
A lawyer who chases ambulances?
Camping on quad since 1996.
This is madness!
Madness? No... this is Yellowstone
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
boring...
God's gift to chicks
And here I thought they were visiting using balloons...
http://xkcd.com/585/
It's always been common knowledge that great whites come in close to shore, after all their food source lives on the beach. The summary and TFA make it sound like some great revilation that sharks go where their prey goes.... hell here in australia there's a few attacks each year.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I am not afraid of Great White Sharks, but I am very afraid (after reading Dan Brown) of the EFF Sharks!
They are hungry for Twinkies. :o
There are occasional sightings while surfing up and down the central coast. They are there. Sometimes you can see them, sometimes you can't. In fact, one such surfer had his board snapped in half just last week down in Santa Cruz: http://www.surfline.com/video/featured-clips/eric-geiselmans-shark-encounter_32974
Plus given the warmer waters this summer and the abundance of sea lions (food!) I would expect that there will be some good feeding this year for the Landlords.
Such beautiful creatures. Although I'm glad not to see them in the bay here in Melbourne.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Relatively few humans are crazy enough to swim near the Golden Gates in the first place. There's a reason Alcatraz was such a secure prison, despite being a fairly short swim away from San Francisco; and it has nothing to do with sharks. Hypothermia, fast tides and currents, a rocky coastline, and a major shipping channel are not very conducive to happyfunbeachday.
Imagine all the people...
Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat
What, no "youregonnaneedabiggerboat" tag? I'm disappointed in you, slashdot. :(
http://www.xkcd.com/585/
Go "Shark Darting" instead!
You get to peg sharks with 2.3 inch titanium darts!
It's not a good idea to take a quick dip in the water off the boat, though. I think sharks are smart enough to figure out who threw those painful titanium darts sticking out of their backs.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's all part of scientific outreach: http://xkcd.com/585/
So what? Greg Norman has played golf everywhere, it's no big deal.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
In related news, Scientists on the same ship studying shark communication have made a major breakthrough when they repeatedly translated a consistently repeated series of noises from the tagged sharks to mean:
"Grab your pointy sticks and climb on down here into the water with us you air breathing little assholes!"
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
we could get people to start minding their own business
Actually shark researchers have been observing Great Whites returning to the Farallon Islands about 35 miles west of the Golden Gate for over 20 years. This website doesn't talk about migration and return, but Susan Casey's book The Devil's Teeth does discuss how the researchers on the island saw many of the same sharks returning year after year.
The surprising things in the research (as opposed to the article) are the genetic distinction of the Hawaii-California sharks versus sharks in the Western Pacific, and to a lesser extent the fact that sharks habitually come close to shore but rarely interact with humans.
We need a bigger boat.
Was ask albacore fisherman on the West Coast if they had seen any White Sharks.
Or asked some West coast divers.
But I guess that wouldn't have been as scientific.
Of course it would have been too easy to ask the locals near Stinson Beach, or Dillon Beach.
Several years back, an acquaintance of my sister was sea kayaking off of Northern California with her boy friend. They came up missing. They found one of them, I forget which, drifting, dead of blood loss, in the two kayaks which were lashed together. The one they found was missing large chunks of body. The other person was never found. While the sharks seem to mind their own business most of the time, the few exceptions are killers.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Maybe not directly under the Golden Gate, but you don't have to go very far to still be in sight of the bridge and find a beach and/or a place where people surf.
It's not like a shark can't travel distance or anything. So, maybe a 5 minute cruise for a shark, and there's people there.
I think what's more relevant here is that there's a lot of sharks in very close proximity to where people actually go. A lot more sharks (and a lot more often) than people had previously realized.
Cheers
Try searching YouTube for "surfing Fort Point."
I've seen people surfing directly under the Golden Gate (singular, for the benefit of the GP) for decades. And as the parent points out, there are several beaches very close to the mouth of the Gate. Additionally, the summary mentioned Great Whites coming east of the Golden Gate Bridge. That's inside the bay, right where those surfers and the aforementioned beaches are located.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
The large shadows I've seen and strange unaccounted for splashing noises I've heard over the years, while out in winter surf, which sparked spooky feelings, are definitely something; and something big. Sometimes they are dolphins, but other times, when you don't see a dolphin, man does the hair stand up on the back of your neck....
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Here in Humboldt Bay, we've got plenty of great whites as well.
My family likes to fish shark once in a while. When I was a kid my dad and his friend pulled up a great white that was longer than his 14 foot aluminum boat!
You also hear about shark attacks from great whites at Moonstone Beach (about 20 miles north).
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I've never thought that the sharks are wandering out in the wide open. Put it this way, the sea lions and seals they eat are at the mouths of rivers (and in the bay) because of the fish spawn. The sharks should be found where their food is.
But the shark just wanted to taste the rainbow!
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
While the sharks seem to mind their own business most of the time, the few exceptions are killers.
"Since 1580, when records began, the total number of attacks on humans by sharks has been logged at about 2,200 only. This is equivalent to just 5% of the number of Americans injured by toilets in the year 1996." --Stephen Fry on QI
Validate the number yourself by looking though the records of the The International Shark Attack File (ISAF). The ISAF is a global database of shark attacks.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Shark_Attack_File]
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
"humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random,"
You must mean humans that don't live near a coast.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He'll eat some gentle people there.
Ceci n'est pas un post.