[Animals] These two sharks have traveled more than 6,000 kilometers together, but are they friends?

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Slowly, a great white shark swims toward the boat and climbs onto a specialized hydraulic lift. Attracted to the bait, the shark's mouth is hooked and it is encouraged to swim toward the boat like "teaching a dog to walk on a leash," says Bob Hueter, chief scientist at OCEARCH, a nonprofit organization specializing in shark tracking.

Once the shark gets on the boat, "it's like a pit crew in a car race," Hueter says. One scientist ventilates the shark by inserting a hose of cold seawater into its mouth, while another ties a rope to its tail to prevent the animal from hurting itself. In about 15 minutes, the research team carries out a dozen procedures, including measuring the shark, performing ultrasounds and taking blood, muscle, semen and feces samples for various research projects.

The work is part of OCEARCH's efforts to study western North Atlantic white sharks, a po[CENSORED]tion less studied than others in the world. "Here we are, in Jaws' place, and yet we don't know the animals as well as we should," Hueter says.

Two juvenile white sharks tagged in this way, Simon and Jekyll, recently became famous thanks to a social media post that claimed the pair had been traveling together for more than 4,000 miles along the North American Atlantic coast. People began to wonder if sharks could be friends, but the situation is not that simple.

"Friendship implies an emotional connection. It's not about that," says Yannis Papastamatiou, a biologist at Florida International University (United States) who is not involved in the project; "Sharks don't form emotional bonds with each other. Most animals don't."

 

 

These sharks may not be "friends," but there are no previous records of two sharks traveling together for such a long period, leading scientists to wonder what this might reveal about the mysteries of shark migration.

(Related: The return of the white shark to Cape Cod, is it already the area with the highest density of this shark in the world?)

The strange case of Simon and Jekyll
The two juvenile males (each between 10 and 15 years old and almost 2.5 meters long) were tagged for the first time off the coast of Georgia in December 2022. The tags transmit data via satellite when one of the sharks surface, allowing researchers and the public to follow the animals' movements in real time online.

In spring, sharks migrate to summer feeding grounds. Salvador Jorgensen, a marine ecologist at California State University (United States), explains that the sharks he studies in the eastern Pacific come and go from the "white shark cafe," a remote place in the Pacific between Baja California (Mexico) and Hawaii with plenty of fish and squid, at slightly different times. "Many males run very similar migratory routes and cycles, but they travel separately," says Jorgensen.

When Simon and Jekyll arrived on Long Island, researchers noted that their footprints were remarkably similar. They then arrived in Nova Scotia, Canada "practically the same day," says Hueter, strange behavior for great whites. "We sat down and said, 'What's going on here?'

Although it was a one-time event, such a similar route for the two sharks for a long time and over a great distance is significant. "This is not a quick snapshot," explains Papastamatiou. "If you were driving your car, and another car was 200 meters behind you all the way from Florida to New York, you are traveling together."

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/09/tiburon-blanco-amistad-viaje-mas-6000-kilometros

Edited September 23, 2023 by [Ty]M@g0k1l3r
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