A juvenile great white shark tagged with a radio beacon last fall just north of Maine has been on quite a trip.
Scientists tagged the 450-pound beauty last fall in the Bay of Fundy, just north of Portland.
Brookes, as the shark is named, then swam down the entire east coast, around the southern tip of Florida, north to the panhandle in Gulf of Mexico, back down and again around the tip of Florida, then back north to the bay between Maine and Canada, arriving Saturday July 4.
What better a way for a carefree young shark to cap a 4,500 mile trip than arriving back home on the 250th birthday of the United States.
Researchers tagged Brookes along with several other sharks in September to study their migration patterns, according to FoxWeather.com.
They say Brookes, who apparently likes the colder water off Maine and Canada during the warmer months, will head back down the coast starting about Labor Day looking to winter down south.
You can follow Brookes and her friends here on the Ocearch.org tracker app.
The great white is a highly migratory species, traveling between the coast and the open ocean and even between continents.
The great whites first appear in the fossil record in the Pacific basin around 5 million years ago.
So they’ve gotten this swimming thing down pat by now.
The shark family in all its iterations first appeared on earth roughly 450 million years ago, meaning they survived multiple mass extinction events, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Bay of Fundy “ just north of The People’s Republic of Portland “. ????
that’s a stretch or should I say shrinkage?