The huge ocean is rather a lot much less lonely with a buddy.
Scientists have found two nice white sharks, referred to as Simon and Jekyll, who’ve been touring collectively “in tandem” up the coast of North America for greater than 4,000 miles.
“This is potentially groundbreaking,” Bob Hueter, chief scientist at marine analysis group OCEARCH, stated in a video posted to Facebook on Sunday.
“White sharks lead a very solitary existence,” he continued. “We don’t really expect to see these white sharks staying together, but Simon and Jekyll ― they seem to be buddies in the sense that they’re going the same place at the same time.”
Philip Thurston by way of Getty Images
Researchers started monitoring the 2 comparatively younger males in December final 12 months, once they had been briefly caught and tagged with monitoring gadgets close to the southeast coast of the United States. Since then, the pair of apex predators made the lengthy journey north to Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, swimming collectively all of the whereas.
Ecologist Yannis Papastamatiou of Florida International University told The New York Times that in his personal analysis, he’s seen white sharks “hanging out” collectively at particular websites for hours on finish. He famous that sharks could group collectively for functions like mating, heading off predators or discovering food.
In an article last year for The Conversation, Papastamatiou additionally cited a study of white sharks in Australia that discovered sharks congregating round a seal colony would are likely to spend time with the identical people throughout the bigger group.
“The fact that white sharks not only stay close to each other but also have preferred buddies got me wondering if maybe these animals were more social than people thought,” Papastamatiou wrote on the time.
In the OCEARCH video, Hueter added within the video that researchers might be analyzing Simon and Jekyll’s blood ― samples of which had been taken once they had been tagged ― to find out if they’re siblings, in case that will play any function of their shut relationship.
