Are two great white sharks that have taken a very similar path north this year brothers or half brothers?
That’s what shark researchers are trying to figure out, after juvenile male white sharks Simon and Jekyll were both tagged off the coast of Georgia and have moved close to one another up the Atlantic coast for more than 4,000 miles.
Historically, white sharks have been known as solitary animals migrating on their own, but Simon and Jekyll are traveling to the same place at the same time.
“They’ve taken an unusually synchronous path north,” OCEARCH Chief Scientist Bob Hueter told the Herald.
“It’s the first time we’ve seen something like this, and it’s very interesting, it’s mysterious and it’s exciting,” he added.
When OCEARCH researchers tagged 9-footer Simon and 8-footer Jekyll off the Georgia coast in December, the scientists took a number of samples — including blood, tissue and muscle samples.
The researchers have asked a geneticist to examine the samples, and see if they’re siblings moving along the same path.
“We’re excited to find out if there’s a family relationship between them,” Hueter said.
He noted that Simon and Jekyll are not swimming side-by-side, fin-to-fin. But the sharks have been traveling on a very, very similar path, he emphasized.
The latest pings for the great white sharks have shown them way up north, deep in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canadian waters.
While Cape Cod is a hotspot for white shark activity in the summer and fall, Atlantic Canada is also a popular area for the apex predators.
“More than half of our tagged sharks bypass Cape Cod and go to Atlantic Canada now,” Hueter said. “It’s a core area for them in the summertime, and it’s just as important as Cape Cod now.”
The results of the genetic testing are potentially groundbreaking because shark researchers have been in the dark about white sharks’ social and family structures.
“They have appeared to be solitary animals,” Hueter said. “They come together to aggregation sites to feed, like along Cape Cod, but we haven’t known anything about the relationships between and among white sharks before.”
