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GREAT WHITE  SHARK - About Great White Sharks

Great White Shark
Information about Great white sharks, their habitat, environment, life cycle, feeding patterns, facts about white sharks and pictures of great white sharks.

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    The Great White is found throughout temperate and subtropical regions of the world's oceans. A voracious and efficient predator, its prey includes a wide variety of bony fishes, including salmon, hake, halibut, mackerel and tunas, other sharks, sea turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals. The Great White can grow to 21 feet and weigh 4,000 pounds. It is the world's largest ocean predator but attacks on humans are rare. The Great White has a white belly, a dark back, and reaches a swimming speed of 25 mph. It can leap out of the water while attacking its prey from below and behind.

Great white shark babies
When a great white shark is born, along with up to a dozen siblings, it immediately swims away from its mother. Baby sharks are on their own right from the start, and their mother may see them only as prey. At birth the baby shark is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long already; as it grows it may reach a length three times that.

The pup (which is what a baby shark is called) will live its life at the top of the ocean’s food chain. As the largest predatory fish in the ocean, great white sharks are the top predators of the sea. But before it grows larger, the pup must avoid predators bigger than it is—including other great white sharks. Many baby sharks do not survive their first year.

White Sharks Feeding Habits
Great white sharks do not eat people! Young great white sharks eat fish (including other sharks) and rays. As it grows, the shark’s favourite prey becomes sea mammals, especially sea lions and seals.

Great white sharks - predators supreme
Sharks count on the element of surprise as they hunt. When they see a seal at the surface of the water, sharks will often position themselves underneath the seal. Then they swim upward at a fast sprint, bursting out of the water in a leap called a breach, and falling back into the water with the seal in their mouths.

How great white sharks eat
Sharks don’t chew their food; they rip off chunks of meat and swallow them whole. After eating a seal or a sea lion the great white shark can last a month or two without another big meal.

Female great white sharks usually bear their first young when they are 12 to 14 years old. And if the pups survive their youth, they, too, become predators at the top of the food chain

Great White Shark Shark Picture Gallery
 

 


Information partly sourced from National Geographic.

 

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