OCEARCH the organization that helps track movements of marine creatures has revealed some fascinating details on a great white shark that moved into the Gulf of Mexico in 2020.
“Miss Costa”, a great white tagged a few years ago pinged this year in the Gulf of Mexico in mid-March and she made it past the Mississippi River before turning around.
Miss Costa was 12 feet 5 inches long when she was tagged in 2016 off the coast of Nantucket, MA, and could be between 14 and 15 feet long today.
Her trip to the Florida Panhandle is significant because OCEARCH doesn’t often track large white sharks that far north into the Gulf, especially big females. It’s been known for a long time that white sharks visit the Gulf of Mexico, but the majority of their activity there remains a mystery since data sets on their movements in the region are lacking compared to other areas in the Northwest Atlantic.
Earlier this year, OCEARCH tracked white sharks, Nova and Cabot, into the Gulf, but their tracks stuck pretty close to the Florida Keys. There are also reports from February of this year that fishermen on a pier in Pensacola, FL hooked a white shark. Tracking data OCEARCH started collecting in 2012 shows white sharks can be found in the Gulf of Mexico for at least six months out of the year. Data on the OCEARCH Tracker shows the apex predators there as early as December and as late as July. Most of the pings are over the continental shelf west of Florida.
Now Miss Costa’s new tracks can help us start adding more depth to our understanding of white shark movements in the Gulf. Her trip this year is similar to a foray she made into the Gulf in January of 2018. This year’s trip also matches up almost exactly to the timing of white shark Hilton’s visit to the same area in 2018. Hilton, a mature male, laid down the closest tracks to the Panhandle that OCEARCH has ever collected. He also visited the DeSoto Canyon, a productive fishing area south of Pensacola that Miss Costa could visit this year.