60 Fun Facts About Great White Shark

What is the great white shark's scientific name?

The others are the bull shark, tiger shark and shortfin mako.

The great white's genus name combines two Greek words meaning what?

Sharp tooth: the same Greek root for 'sharp' or 'jagged' gave the ancient Greeks their everyday word for a shark, which the great white carries as the second half of its scientific name.

Which name do Australians commonly use for the great white shark?

White pointer: like 'great white', the name comes from the pale belly, the first thing anyone saw when a dead shark lay upside down on a boat's deck.

How does a mature female great white typically compare with a mature male?

Clearly longer: she also takes about 33 years to mature against 26 for a male, and that slow start is one reason great white numbers recover so slowly from losses.

Researchers tell individual great whites apart by the notched rear edge of which fin?

Its dorsal fin: the edge works like a fingerprint, and photographs of it have let researchers recognise a single shark across more than twenty years and estimate how many there are.

Which two sharks are larger than the great white?

The whale shark and basking shark are the two biggest sharks alive, yet both are harmless filter feeders that cruise open-mouthed for plankton, which leaves the great white as the largest shark that hunts.

How do great whites replace lost teeth?

Rows behind move forward like a conveyor belt, so most of the roughly 300 teeth in a great white's mouth are spares held in reserve, and new ones keep growing for life.

Young great whites have slender, pointed teeth suited to gripping which main prey?

Fish: juveniles live on fish and rays, and only as they grow do their teeth broaden into the saw-edged triangles that let adults carve up seals and dolphins.

Besides storing energy, what does a great white's oily liver do?

Adds buoyancy: the oil is lighter than seawater, and tags show a great white growing less buoyant as a long migration burns its liver reserves away.

What unusual physiological trait lets the great white hunt in cold water?

It is partially warm-blooded: a net of blood vessels traps the heat of its swimming muscles, keeping its core well above the sea's temperature, at the price of a huge appetite to fuel it.

Which animals do great whites often bite but rarely eat, probably because they carry too little fat?

Sea otters have no blubber, only dense fur, and one theory holds that great whites reject such low-fat prey, which is why bitten otters are rarely eaten.

Scientists estimate a great white's age by counting growth bands, like tree rings, in which body part?

Its vertebrae: the bands showed that males mature at about 26 and females at about 33, which is why great white numbers take so long to recover.

A 2008 computer model estimated that the largest great whites could bite with about how much force?

About 1,800 kg: researchers scanned a young great white's jaws, rebuilt them in a computer and scaled the model up to the size of the largest adults.

What are the electroreceptive pits on a shark's snout called?

Ampullae of Lorenzini are jelly-filled pores that pick up the faint electric field of a living body, so a great white can sense the beating heart of prey it cannot see.

Why does a great white swim constantly?

To ram water through its gills to breathe: unlike nurse sharks, which can pump water over their gills while lying still, a great white gets oxygen only by moving forward.

How does a great white protect its eyes when attacking, given it lacks a nictitating membrane?

By rolling them back in their sockets as it strikes, since a thrashing seal fights back with teeth and claws; many other sharks slide a protective third eyelid across the eye instead.

The White Shark Café, an ocean spot where great whites gather each winter, lies halfway between North America and which islands?

Hawaii: Stanford researchers named the spot after their tags showed coastal sharks wintering far out at sea, making repeated deep 'bounce dives' that may be for feeding or for finding mates.

Great whites usually stay near the surface, but how deep have they dived?

About 1,300 metres: near the coast great whites keep mostly to the top of the water column, and their deepest dives come on long open-ocean crossings.

A great white tagged off southern Africa swam to Australia and back within nine months, covering about how far?

20,000 km: the shark swam to Australia's north-west coast and back, a journey through several nations' waters that shows why a shark protected in one country is so hard to keep safe.

A great white usually cruises at a pace closest to which of these?

A person walking: sharks carrying speed loggers off a seal colony swam at roughly 3 to 5 km/h, slower than their most efficient speed, which the researchers read as saving energy while the seals come to them.

A great white that keeps missing a bait may lift its head and rhythmically gape its jaws, a display read as what?

Frustration is the leading reading: one researcher likened the display to a person punching a wall, a way to let off steam without provoking the other sharks nearby.

Which seals do great whites mainly target?

Newly weaned young are the best bargain: they carry thick blubber but are small, inexperienced and naive about what waits below, while an adult fights back with teeth and claws.

Great whites at Seal Island, near Cape Town, are famous for catching seals how?

Breaching clear of the water: the shark stalks from the depths and rockets up beneath a seal outlined against the surface, hitting so hard that both can leave the sea.

How do great whites usually attack toothed whales like dolphins?

They target the tail, underside or back; they are likelier to scavenge large whales than hunt them.

How do great whites settle disputes over prey?

Splash fights, slapping the surface with their tails, let two sharks decide who keeps a kill without touching. Real combat is extremely rare, because a bite from a rival this well armed is too risky.

When two great whites swim side by side or circle each other, what are they thought to be doing?

Settling rank by size: observers have logged some twenty such rituals, and once they show who is bigger, the smaller shark gives way and nobody has to risk a fight.

How does the great white reproduce?

Eggs hatch inside the mother, who bears live pups after a pregnancy thought to last a year or more. In the womb they feed on yolk, then a uterine 'milk', then her unfertilised eggs.

In 2023, a pale pup thought to be a newborn great white was filmed from the air off which US state?

California: the pup was shedding a whitish film, perhaps left over from the womb, a hint that great whites give birth close to that southern coast.

Great whites were found to live 70 years or more once researchers dated them using carbon traces left by what?

Nuclear bomb tests spiked the sea with radiocarbon, a timestamp laid down in growing sharks; it showed one male was 73, far older than anyone had thought a great white could be.

Where was the first recorded orca predation on a great white, in 1997?

The Farallon Islands, off San Francisco, where a female orca killed a great white that year. Tagged sharks there have since been tracked fleeing as soon as orcas arrive, abandoning a rich hunting ground.

How do orcas subdue a great white before tearing out its liver?

Flipping it belly-up: an upturned shark slips into tonic immobility, a trance-like paralysis, and orcas have been seen exploiting it before removing the fat-rich liver and leaving the rest.

Which 1971 documentary followed divers on a quest to film great white sharks?

Blue Water, White Death followed its divers from Durban to Sri Lanka without meeting a single great white, until a final trip to South Australia brought the sharks right up to their cages.

Who wrote the 1974 novel Jaws and later regretted the man-eater image it created?

Peter Benchley spent his later years writing and campaigning for shark conservation, and said he could not write Jaws today, because great white attacks on people turned out to be rare mistakes.

The mechanical sharks in Jaws were nicknamed 'Bruce' after whom?

Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer, gave his name to the mechanical sharks, which salt water kept wrecking; that is why the finished film keeps its monster out of sight for so long.

Where was Jaws mostly filmed?

Martha's Vineyard stood in for Amity Island, and islanders filled many of the smaller roles; the planned 55-day shoot ran months over as the mechanical shark kept failing at sea.

The 'bite and spit' theory held that a great white bites a seal, lets go, then does what?

Waits for it to bleed out before returning to feed; later observers found little support, concluding that sharks simply let go of prey that fights back or proves poor eating.

As of 2024, which shark ranks second to the great white for unprovoked bites on people in the International Shark Attack File?

Tiger shark, with 142 recorded bites to the great white's 351; the file itself warns that big, easily recognised sharks top the list partly because victims can name them.

A great white was blamed for the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks, but some experts suspect which other shark?

Bull shark: several of the attacks came in Matawan Creek, a tidal creek well inland, and bull sharks are the big sharks known for swimming far up rivers into fresh water.

Critics of the 'mistaken identity' theory say great whites bite surfers for which other reason?

To investigate something new: a shark explores with its teeth and gums, and most bites on surfers are too shallow to kill a seal, more like the test bites it gives boats and other objects.

Which institution kept great whites most successfully, displaying six between 2004 and 2011?

One shark stayed 198 days and drew a million visitors; a 4-million-gallon net pen let them recover from capture first.

Sandy, a 2.3 m great white kept at Steinhart Aquarium in 1980, was released after how long?

Five days: she would not eat and kept bumping into the walls of her tank, so the aquarium's scientists carried her back out to sea and set her free.

Which government banned great white tourism at Guadalupe Island in January 2023?

Mexico closed the island's reserve to all shark tourism, film crews included, after reports of divers leaving their cages, careless baiting and sharks injured between cage bars.

How does the IUCN classify the great white globally?

Vulnerable, one step short of Endangered: the main killers are fishing gear that catches the sharks by accident and the nets and baited lines set off beaches to protect swimmers.

Which country became the first to give great white sharks legal protection, in the early 1990s?

South Africa banned both killing great whites and selling their parts, such as the jaws that can fetch thousands of dollars as trophies; Namibia and the Maldives were among the first to follow.

A 2025 genome study's co-author put the world's great white population at what size?

About 20,000: as Gavin Naylor of the Florida Museum put it, there are more fruit flies in any given city than there are great white sharks in the entire world.

Rebounding seals have drawn some 800 great whites to which US coastline?

Cape Cod: its grey seals were hunted for bounties until they had almost vanished, and as the colonies rebounded, the sharks that prey on them followed.

Which stretch of water splits Australia's great whites into eastern and western groups?

Bass Strait, between the mainland and Tasmania, marks the line: sharks to its east mix with New Zealand's, while those to the west form a separate breeding group that needs its own protection.

Which extinct giant did the great white replace as it spread around the globe in the Pliocene?

Megalodon died out about 3.6 million years ago, and one leading idea is that competition from the smaller, newly evolved great white, along with cooling seas, helped finish it off.

Genome studies split great whites into North Atlantic, North Pacific and which third lineage?

Indo-Pacific: sharks from southern Africa to New Zealand form one lineage, and genomes show the three groups keep apart even though single sharks can cross whole oceans.

Great whites can tolerate unusually high blood levels of which toxic metals?

Mercury and arsenic turned up in wild great whites' blood at levels that would poison most vertebrates, yet the sharks showed no sign of harm, as if they carry some built-in protection.

Like salmon, female great whites are thought to do what when the time comes to give birth?

Return to their home waters: tagged sharks come back to the same stretches of coast year after year, even after spending months thousands of kilometres out in mid-ocean.

Which fast, open-ocean sharks are the great white's closest living relatives?

Mako sharks share the mackerel shark family, Lamnidae, with the great white, the porbeagle and the salmon shark, and fossil teeth suggest the great white itself may descend from an extinct broad-toothed mako.

What is the coloration pattern of a great white, dark above and pale below, called?

Countershading makes a stalking great white hard to spot: seen from above, its dark back is lost against the gloom below, an edge it uses when it ambushes prey at the surface.

A great white's skin is covered in tiny tooth-like scales known by what name?

Dermal denticles shield the skin and smooth the flow of water over it; a great white's are unusually small, which leaves its skin smoother than that of most other sharks.

Pigment cells called melanocytes suggest great whites may be able to do what while stalking prey?

Lighten or darken their skin: researchers think this may give a great white finer control of its camouflage as it sneaks up on prey from below, and single sharks have been seen to darken over months.

Under which CITES listing does trade in great white specimens or parts require permits?

Appendix II still allows trade, but only with export permits; the listing was aimed at the international market in great white jaws, teeth and fins, which had put a high price on the sharks.

Europe's great whites, down by over half since the 1970s, live mostly in which sea?

The Mediterranean: records there show a collapse of roughly 60 per cent in a few decades, and it is now illegal to catch a great white anywhere along its coasts.

Which 1972 US law let seal colonies rebound and, in turn, brought great whites back to feed on them?

The Marine Mammal Protection Act made killing seals a federal offence, and the colonies it rebuilt now feed great whites that hunt in murky shallows close to shore.

Great whites off Guadalupe Island carry scars attributed to which unusual attackers?

Squids: the scars, mostly on the sharks' heads and bodies, point to struggles in the ocean's dim twilight zone, where great whites are thought to dive after jumbo and even giant squid.

Great whites sometimes lift their heads out of the water, a habit shared with whales and called what?

Spyhopping appears to give the shark a look at objects above the surface, and great whites are unusual among sharks in doing it.