**Thursday night update: The tagging effort mentioned below has been halted by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. White sharks are are a candidate for the California Endangered Species Act and, apparently, the proper permits were not in place. The whale carcass, at the time of this 10 p.m. update, was being towed to an area where it most likely will not end up back on the coast.
About 20 miles beyond San Diego, Keith Poe sits in his boat and keeps watch for sharks, specifically great whites.
He knows they’ll come because attached to Poe’s boat, at the end of a long rope, is a 50-foot fin whale carcass–the best kind of chum.
The whale washed ashore Monday at Point Loma, not far from SeaWorld, and experts could not figure out a practical way to dispose of the large cetacean. (The cause of death is not yet clear.)
Enter the Marine Conservation Science Institute , which volunteered to tow the whale to sea in the name of science. That happened late Wednesday afternoon and evening, with the help of lifeguards, NOAA and, of course, Poe.
Poe, a veteran fisherman and shark tagger, brought lots of popup tags and is hoping to fit them on great whites and, specifically, pregnant great whites. The tags will have a deployment life of 140 days and allow MCSI scientists to determine where they go from here and, thus, where they came from.
(Adult white sharks congregate seasonally at seal rookeries at Guadalupe Island, 160 miles west of Ensenada, Mexico, and the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco, and other Bay Area sites.)
On Wednesday the MCSI announced its plan via Facebook :
“We will tow [the whale] offshore and then babysit it while we wait for sharks to find us. When that happens we hope to tag adult females that are in the area for pupping. This will be the first attempt to tag pupping females in Southern California.”
Some scientists believe that great white sharks give birth near the Southern California coast, and also along the Baja California coastline. Michael Domeier, president and executive director of MCSI, has tracked Guadalupe Island white sharks extensively, and believes they also enter Mexico’s Sea of Cortez to give birth.
Juvenile white sharks are seen or encountered fairly regularly by Southern California beachgoers and fishermen. They're also
They feed in nearshore waters off Southern California and Baja California until they become large enough to begin preying on seals and sea lions, mostly at or near the rookeries mentioned above.
Poe stated via Facebook message on Wednesday night that he was alone with the whale and expected to stay at sea 5-7 days.
But there’s a great deal of scent emanating outward and downward, so it’s unlikely that Poe is alone, and when the sharks start appearing he'll be anything but lonely.
–Pete Thomas
–Top photo, showing the whale carcass being hauled offshore, is courtesy of the Marine Conservation Science Institute; great white shark photo is generic
