The Great White Shark

This One Feels Like a Keeper!

The Great White shark is a streamlined swimming and ferocious predator with 3,000 teeth give or take, at any one time. The greatly feared shark has an enormous body, is built for blazing speed. It sports a pointed snout, a crescent-shaped tail, five gill slits, no fin spines, an anal fin, and three main fins: the dorsal fin and two pectoral fins. When the shark is near the surface, the dorsal fin and part of the tail are just visible above the water.Great White sharks average 12-16 feet long. The biggest great white shark on record was 23 feet long, weighing about 7,000 pounds. Females are larger than males and shark pups can be over 5 feet long at birth! Young Great Whites eat fish, rays, seals, birds and other sharks. Adults eat larger prey, like larger seals, sea lions, small whales. otters and sea turtles. They're carrion eaters and will make a meal of dead fish or animals, found floating in their paths. Great whites don't chew their food, they rip the prey into mouth-sized morsels, which are then swallowed whole.

Hot Spots for Great Whites include, but aren't limited to, the SO. African coastline, several Australian hot spots, Western Coastline of the USA and the Mediterranean as far North as the waters off Croatia. Recently a "tagged" Great White Shark took a swim from the Western coastline of the USA to HI - roughly 2000 miles. I wouldn't have wanted to be swimming in his route since he must have been one very hungry shark upon his arrival in HI.

Here's a link to a nice size shark swimming off of Molokini Island in about 20' of water. This shark photo was "cropped" for size but NO post processing was done to the original RAW image. I do get tempted at times to fire up Adobe PhotoShop and give it a "once over" - I'm sure there's a gem of a shot remaining after the green is neutralized. This was shot in an older model 3 MP Canon SureShot ,set on automatic through an ewa-marine waterproof digital camera case!