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It's Not Like You Can Whack it on the Nose with a Rolled Up Newspaper
Monterey Bay Aquarium has released its great white shark. The reason? She'd started to eat her tank-mates. Bad shark! Bad sh--rggkk!!!! *crunch* *crunch*
The previous record for keeping a great white in captivity was 16 days. Monterey managed to keep this one going for 198. If this turns out not to be a fluke (as it were), I'd imagine a purpose-built great white display is in the cards. I wonder what their innovation was?
Hi all,
I'm the VP of Communications at the aquarium and helped with her release early Thursday a.m.
We thought and still think the innovation was to consider very young sharks. Five feet or under appears best. We confirm the animal is in good condition when a fisherman nets it, transfer it quickly to a 4-million gallon open ocean pen located offshore for that purpose, then allow it to adapt to navigating and feeding in the net pen. We opted to move her to the aquarium after several weeks of doing well in the enclosure, and with high confidence she would do well in transit.
She did. She gained 16 inches in length and 100 pounds in six months+. She had shown no interest in the other animals in the exhibit until the last month, when two soupfins were bitten and subsequently died. While these were seen on tape and were not interpreted as "hunting behavior" (the soupfins shared the same space in the exhibit, and we suspected it was being in the wrong place at the wrong time,) she began to exhibit a clear hunting behavior in the past week and putting the other animals at much greater risk.
At the same time, the larger she had grown, the greater was our concern about being able to remove her from the exhibit, transport her and release her in a way that was safe for her and our staff. AS it turned out, her 162 pounds were substantially more weight than we had guessed, and it was a challenge to do it right.
She's gone. If all goes well, her satellite tag will release in 30 days and we will have news about what she's been doing. More than a million people saw her, and the vast majority of our visitors strongly supported keeping her on exhibit. Our visitor studies showed people were leaving with higher, more specific awareness of shark conservation issues. In our view, it worked as well as it could.
We'll be conducting our field research again this summer, that involves tracking and tagging young of the year to add to the knowledge database about this top predator and how they can be better protected.
Hope that helps.
Hank Armstrong
Vice President Communications
Monterey Bay Aquarium