At 9 feet and 425 pounds, this great white shark is enjoying the South Carolina winter
Anne Bonny, a nine-foot, 425-pound great white shark, is making herself comfortable off the coast of South Carolina.
OCEARCH, a nonprofit agency that tags and tracks ocean animals attached a device to the juvenile great white in April 2023. Since then, she has traveled over 8,000 miles, swimming up and around Nova Scotia and moving all the way back down to the ocean waters off the Lowcountry. Her tracker last pinged off the coast of Georgetown, SC on January 9, though last year she made it as far south as Beaufort.
Researchers with OCEARCH captured and tagged her in North Carolina, where great white sharks sometimes linger on their migration north, according to John Tyminski, a senior data scientist with the research group. The team named her after the famous pirate, Anne Bonny, who was active in the Caribbean from 1718 to 1720.
The Move South
During the summer months, great white sharks feed on seals and other sources of prey in New England. Cape Cod has become one of the biggest white shark hotspots in the world, due in part to a resurging grey seal population. But as temperatures drop, the sharks begin to move south down the eastern coast.
The exact trigger for this migration is unclear and still the subject of research, but many sharks make their way to Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas for the winter. It’s difficult to predict how long Anne Bonny will stay near South Carolina, but the her three week stay near Georgetown indicates that she’s comfortable for now.
“I can see that she’s sort of on the edge of the Gulfstream, on the edge of the warm water,” Tyminski said. “What she’s found there is hard to say exactly, but she is probably at a nice comfortable temperature and you have to assume she has a food source.”
What’s next for Ann Bonny?
Since she was tagged in 2023, Anne Bonny hasn’t ventured further south than Beaufort. But it wouldn’t be surprising if her range expanded as she grew older. It’s difficult to predict her exact age, but Tyminski estimates that she’s between 10 and 20 years old based on her size. Female great white sharks don’t reach sexual maturity and begin to have pups until she’s about 30 years old.
The tags that OCEARCH uses last approximately five years, so ideally researchers and the curious public will be able to follow her journey for the next three-and-a-half years. The data from Anne Bonny and other tagged sharks will help researchers better comprehend the species’ migration patterns.
“It’s very important to gain an understanding of what the movement and migration patterns are and if there are key corridors that need to be better protected,” Tyminski said.
This story was originally published January 14, 2025 at 1:09 PM.
