Ocean Ramsey, a shark researcher, found herself diving next to an enormous great white shark recently off Oahu, Hawaii, recently. She thinks it may have been Deep Blue, at 20 feet long and 8 feet wide the largest great white ever recorded; she once swam with Deep Blue off Guadalupe Island, Mexico.
Ramsey came across the shark while it was feeding on the carcass of a sperm whale about 15 miles offshore. NOAA had towed the carcass there because it had been attracting smaller sharks near the beach where it died. Ramsey said that tiger sharks were feeding on the carcass but they left when the giant great white appeared. Then she and other divers swam with the great white and filmed it.
The great white was not aggressive, Ramsey said. “She was just this big beautiful gentle giant wanting to use our boat as a scratching post,” she told my friend Mindy Pennybacker in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Ramsey swam with the great white and thought the markings and size were the same as Deep Blue, which may be 50 years old. She also thought the shark might be pregnant. “Big pregnant females are actually the safest ones to be with – the biggest oldest ones – because they’ve seen it all, including us,” she said. “That’s why I kind of call her, like, a grandma shark.”
Grandma or not, officials from the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources warned divers and swimmers to stay away from the shark because it might think they were food. Read more:
