Juvenile Great White shark count:
2
Carpinteria area
as of July 16, 2022
We had a large influx of Juveniles April though early May. Massive Red Tides arrived in mid May. We believe this caused the exit of most of the juvenile Great Whites who headed further South towards Ventura County. As of Mid June they have started to return to their favorite nursery area!
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Reef Guardians Shark Program
Reef Guardians in California research vessel REEF GUARDIAN has been quite busy this year from sharks to reef studies along the California coastline. The vessel has played a significant role in research with tagging and tracking juvenile Great White sharks off the Santa Barbara coast line.
L to R: Adam Ravetch, Harry Rabin, AMax deGruy, Will Gale and Tom Piozet with Great Whites of Santa Barbara.
Sharks are a good sign of a healthy ocean environment! They are an essential, keystone species that help balance other animals in the ocean's food web, and without them, many, many other species would die. So it's important to do all we can to keep them safe and flourishing! We have been busy working closely with shark experts like Dr. Mike Heithaus at FIU in addition to our past work with Dr. Chris Lowe at CSULB Shark Lab.
We recently donated Monterey Bay Aquarium some cool Great White footage for the Aquarium's film that features great whites. For the latest news and footage we thank Carlos Gauna for keeping us in the loop with his almost daily aerial surveillance of these apex predators.
Environmental Nonprofit Reef Guardians Hawaii has been leading the great white research in Santa Barbara for over 7 years when we first spotted juvenile Great Whites arriving in late April of 2016. We brought in Dr. Chris Lowe and CSULB Shark Lab in 2017 and donated several resources, including our research vessel! Florida International University is also a new partner for RGH ocean based studies and will be developing an AI backbone for our latest project Robots on the Reef.
Our latest partnerships are with the Florida international University marine science team and California Fish and Wildlife! Together we are currently testing out new ocean surface skimming drones that will be used in our Robots on the Reef project. This research brings Artificial Intelligence into the fold as it will interpret data from both water and aerial based drones as they gather imagery to help determine the health of a reef system. Our work with Fish and Wildlife is in educating the Public and the fishing community about the Great White Shark Nurseries popping up all along the California Coast!