Two great white sharks are cruising near Savannah, according to OCEARCH, a nonprofit ocean research organization.
Genie, a 14-foot, nearly 2,300 pound shark, and Mary Lee, a 16-foot, nearly 3,500 pound shark, were both tagged with a satellite tracking device in September in Cape Cod.
OCEARCH engineers continued to provide Facebook updates on Mary Lee's whereabouts as she traveled up and down the East Coast. But Genie hadn’t shown up on the tracker for a couple months. In order for the sharks to “ping in,” said OCEARCH expedition team leader and founding chairman Chris Fischer, their fins have to surface.
On Sunday morning, after weeks of worried Facebook users expressing their concern on OCEARCH's page, both sharks were pinned together again off the coast of Hilton Head Island, S.C., according to the organization's Global Shark Tracker site.
The sharks were just 10 miles apart at the time of their latest pings.
Fischer says that’s a pretty big deal.
“... It’s interesting that you see two sharks in an area like that,” he said over the phone from Park City, Utah, on Sunday afternoon. “It makes you think they’re not just passing through — they’re living there. It’s over 1,000 miles from where we tagged the sharks. They’re both in the same area months later. That’s a very unusual thing.”
The sharks were tagged aboard the OCEARCH vessel in order for scientists to study what Fischer called “the life history puzzle of the great white shark.”
“We don’t have that fundamental information of their breeding, feeding and birthing,” he said.
Great whites are known to travel near the coast. During calving season, sharks have been spotted following pregnant right whales to prey on sick or injured calves.
Excited as he is that Genie and Mary Lee are confirmed be near one another after all this time, Fischer admits his guess about where they’re headed next is as good as anyone’s.
“Nobody knows,” he said. “We’re solving a 400-million-year-old secret right now. The beauty is you can watch from home.”
—Janay Kingsberry and Dash Coleman
For more OCEARCH updates on the great white tracking near Savannah, visit ocearch.org.