Katharine the great white shark resurfaces off US east coast

Katharine, a 14ft-plus great white shark with a Twitter following, appeared again off the US east coast this week. A transmitter attached to her dorsal fin had not sent out a definitive message for a year and a half.

The transmitter that was attached off Cape Cod in August 2013 is roughly half the size of an iPhone and is meant to ping whenever the shark breaks the ocean surface.

Great whites can go for long periods without surfacing. Katharine did so off South Carolina in May 2019, according to a map maintained by Ocearch, the group tracking her. This spring, Ocearch said it thought Katharine might have been heard from “about 200 miles off the coast of Virginia”.

But on Monday, the group said she had definitely been recorded, hundreds of miles off the same state.

In a post to the Ocearch Facebook page, Dr Bryan Franks of Jacksonville University wrote: “Katharine is alive and well … Katharine pinged in multiple times yesterday, confirming it was not a fluke.”

Tags used on Atlantic white sharks “normally only send data to us for five years”, Franks said, which meant it was “very unusual for us to hear from a shark for this length of time, and it’s exactly the type of data that we are looking for to help put together the puzzle pieces or her life, and other [north-west] Atlantic great white sharks like her.

“Katharine showed movement patterns indicative of being a reproductively mature female white shark with trips during some winters out into the open ocean.

“Her tracks over the past seven years up and down the coast from Cape Cod to Florida and with long forays to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the offshore Atlantic, may cover the movements of two or three cycles of pregnancy and birth of her pups.

“She has already provided an incredible dataset with more than 1,700 locations, covering 37,000 miles of ocean since the day she was tagged. It will be fascinating to see where her next moves may be.”

Katharine was named for Katharine Lee Bates, the 19th-century lyricist who wrote America the Beautiful.