Great White Verified Off TX Coast

Cue the “Jaws” theme.

A great white shark has been confirmed by officials with Ocearch, the satellite-tagging-based research group, to be swimming off the Texas Coast.

Acadia, a 10 foot, 9-inch, 1,600-pound female, quietly pinged near Nansen, one of the big oil platforms where anglers seek tuna and billfish. It’s about 140 miles off the Upper Coast.

A ping happens when a shark breeches and the last one for Acadia was Feb. 27.

Listen to the special Higher Calling Gulf Coast podcast that addresses this Texas great white confirmation, expanding white populations in the Gulf and more.

The shark “z-pinged’ however March 8 which means it signaled a breech but sent no location information. That means Acadia could be farther from the Texas shoreline or maybe closer.

Many thought great whites in Texas waters was a fantasy when I first wrote about the topic in Tide in 2005.

Then “Katherine” and “Betsy”, two Ocearch-tagged great whites showed up in the Gulf a decade later, showing great whites do use the Gulf of Mexico.

Last year we reported on Unama’ki, a massive adult female that was 2,076 pounds at the time of her capture off the coast of Nova Scotia moved into the Gulf just as the coronavirus closures began. This big shark moved as far west as Mississippi.

A paper titled Seasonal Distribution and Historic Trends in Abundance of White Sharks in the Western North Atlantic, published by PLOS ONE sheds some fascinating light on white shark populations.

The study, which examined great white sightings from a wide variety of sources from 1800 to 2010, showed the range of white shark occurrence extended from the north coast of Newfoundland to as far south as the British Virgin Islands, as far east as the Grand Banks and Bermuda, to as far west as the coast of Texas.

According to officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), their earliest recorded white shark was off the coast of Sarasota, Florida on a setline in the winter of 1937. Another specimen was caught in the same area in 1943. Also, NOAA officials reported 35 great whites as by-catch in the Japanese longline fishery in the Gulf from 1979 through 1982.

The removal of gill nets along the shallow areas of the Gulf Coast beginning in 1994 has given young great whites an advantage. They use these areas as “nursery” and for decades were almost all killed in the nets. Great whites are sexually mature at around 10 years of age so we are going on our third generation of whites born without the nets.

There is much to learn about great white behavior and though formerly out of reach, Ocearch’s cutting-edge approach has made knowledge of them possible.

Acadia was tagged Sept. 29, 2020 near Lurenberg, Nova Scotia and showed up in the Gulf Jan. 20. She slowly made her way westward until hitting the northwestern Gulf off of Texas.

Historical records from the 1900s show great whites in catch records from Florida to Port Aransas, Texas.

Without question, these giants are not abundant in Gulf waters, but it’s obvious they don’t mind swimming in its warm currents—and I have a feeling Acadia isn’t the only one out there.

Chester Moore