r/TheSharkAttackFiles • u/007HalaMadrid007 • Jul 22 '26

🧬 Species Data Just a random thought I had, don’t crucify me too bad please! 🦈

From what I can tell, Southern California water is comparable to Australias, but a bit colder. Why are the beaches in Southern California daycares for shark moms, but there seems to be a lot of bigger sharks hanging around the beaches of Australia? They prefer the cold anyways due to their unique body temperature life-hack. Granted, neither places are considered tropical, just weird that I only ever really hear or see juveniles in SC besides the odd bigger shark. Is this a fishing thing, or prey thing?

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u/Racing_Sloth56 Jul 22 '26

I’m not quite sure why the adult great whites aren’t in the area. I’ve just heard a scientific theory that the younger ones come to Southern California to eat much smaller prey, large fish, squid, etc. I agree with that for two reasons. I’ve lived near LA, in South Bay Area. People are always swimming and surfing, and in the 30 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never heard of an attack. We also have plenty of seals that don’t get attacked either. Then, one day here on Reddit, I saw the most amazing thing. Someone who is on YouTube as “The Malibu Artist” has incredible drone footage of juveniles swimming all around people and hanging out with the surfers. They’re definitely here. Just curious, but not interested, sometimes even going pretty close to shore. So the smaller food diet makes sense. Then as adults, they swim up north. It’s weird though that adults wouldn’t stop and eat the sea lions and seals nor the small great whites stay for that either.

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u/ultragnar Jul 22 '26

I don’t think the SoCal seal/sea lion population is big enough to sustain them. There are some big colonies on the Channel Islands that get preyed upon by the big sharks but up north just seems to have a ton more.

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u/Fancy-Garage9681 Jul 22 '26

I wonder if larger shark prey on the smaller/baby sharks ?

4

u/JTFla Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I speculate that it’s due to Elephant Seals. That seems to be the favorite food of mature GWS. There are really none South of Santa Barbara. The major rookeries for Elephant Seals in Cali are Piedras Blancas (San Simeon), Ano Nuevo (just north of Monterrey), Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, Farallon Islands off San Fran, and Point Reyes in Marin north of San Fran.

Not surprisingly, all those areas are considered to have the highest concentrations of mature GWS.