The great white shark population off Northern California’s coast is healthy and growing, a new study finds. A survey of the great whites ( Carcharodon carcharias ) off the northern coast finds a stable adult population and a slight uptick in the number of subadult sharks, totaling 300 individuals. Researchers used a seal decoy to lure the apex predators to their boats so they could photograph and count the sharks. The findings are great for the region. "Robust populations of large predators are critical to the health of our coastal marine ecosystem," study co-author Taylor Chapple, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, said in a statement . "So our findings are not only good news for white sharks, but also for the rich waters just off our shores here." Great white sharks are found in coastal waters across the world. They are threatened by overfishing, according to the World Wildlife Fund , and their global population is in decline. On the Pacific coast, however, the sharks seem to be doing well. Chapple and his team originally published a population estimate for sharks off Northern and Central California in 2011. The new research updates the previous estimate with longer-term […]
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