Tags reveal white sharks have neighborhoods in the north Pacific, say Stanford r...(visits to the other nearshore hot spots....)

"The sharks were detected frequently at their chosen site," Jorgensen said, "which means that they are patrolling around there nearly constantly, for long periods of time. They will occasionally visit one of the adjacent sites, but they always come back."

The team also was surprised to learn about new movements that the acoustic tags revealed in some nearshore locations. They found five white sharks were detected on acoustic receivers beneath the Golden Gate Bridge that originally were installed to listen for salmon, which migrate from the bay to the sea and back again. There are currently no detectors in San Francisco Bay, so there are no data to indicate how far or why the sharks crossed into the bay; however, seals and sea lions are in the region and could be potential prey for the large sharks. Five sharks also were acoustically detected close to shore in Hawaii off Waialua Bay and Kualoa Point on Oahu, and off the coast of Kona.

Genetics techniques were used to examine the relationships of the California sharks to all other white sharks examined globally. Studies of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA sequences show that the populations are distinct, and suggest that the northeastern Pacific population may have been founded by a relatively small number of sharks in the late Pleistocene within the last 200,000 years or so. The other populations of white sharks are concentrated near Australia and South Africa.

Molecular geneticist Carol Reeb, a research associate at Stanford, said, "If you had asked us a few years ago, we would have said white sharks found in California probably migrated throughout the Pacific. Now, even though we know they travel great distances, their paths are surprisingly constrained to specific routes. This explains how a highly migratory marine species becomes a genetically isolated population. This also makes it much easier to appreciate how vulnerable the nor
'/>"/>