So sometimes hope can come from just information... knowing something about the natural world we didn't know always kind of pleases us, gives us a boost.. adds not only to some primordial part of our brain that thinks it might want the info for survival someday, but also it fits like a puzzle piece in our understanding of our surroundings, as our frontal lobe takes pleasure in understanding the complexity of the world around us... but what if the info involves Great White Sharks, the beleaguered North Atlantic Ocean, and menaced beaches!!!!!?
Triple Bonus Points!!
A brain swimming in primordial, I mean super fish brain stem primordial AND intellectual satisfaction!
Let me introduce the Southern California Discovery Channel Adolescent Dude Explosion Shark Extravaganza that is actually science, featuring two women who definitely get around, Mary Lee and Genie (can anyone say Gilligan's Island meets Happy Days meets I Dream of Genie, all your Orange County Adolescent dreams come true!?), plus some hot South Africans as well, known as OSearch (cue the JAWS theme):
http://sharks-ocearch.verite.com/
So if I need to explain, these Bro-Dudes, So-Cal He-Men, perhaps still living up to dad's adventures with Duke Kamehamea on Waikiki in the 60's, are doing something I can't not love, made for TV and the internet, but with tangible results to our understanding of the undersea world, and who can mind that they are doing it with the most feared animal on earth.. it's actually teaching us things even if it looks like the bikini phase of Fear Factor mixed with the X games (as long as they don't replace wrestling with it in the Olympics, I am all for it)..
So they started near Guadalupe Island a few years ago, a National Park and Island in Mexico off the Pacific Coast of Baja, which along with two bays in South Africa are the known feeding spots for high concentrations of Great Whites.. on their super special Ship, the M/V OSearch (it's like GI Joe meets Cousteau!). It was turned into a National Geographic TV show called Shark Men.
Bro, that's like so Dangerous...Waaayyyy....... Woaaaaa.....
So I don't know if they decided to not release real time data on the Pacific Sharks for some reason, or if the technology wasn't quite there yet, but by the time they went to South Africa, the next stop on the list, they were ready... if you'll refer to your OSearch Shark Tracker Ten Trillion, they captured and tagged like 40 sharks that seem to more or less hang out around the coast of South Africa, which is one of the worlds most fascinating by the way, with two currents, a hot current from the Indian Ocean, and a cold current from the Antarctic Mixing around Cape Agthulis and the Cape of Good Hope. They are now all pinging as surface time allows.
I once spoke with, can't make this up, a Swiss guy who is the world population expert on Great Whites, and who was pioneering a way of tracking Great Whites with dorsal fin markings, before Fiscer and the bro's arrived on scene with the fantabulous shark tracking ship of dreams, but this guy speculated there were about 5000 individual Whites left in the oceans, so these are significant samples, and I haven't even dwelled on their first work, which you can find on the OSearch web page, which might have discovered what might be a separate West Coast and Hawaii migration, including the seperate breeding area in the Pacific Shark Cafe 1000 miles south east of Hawaii.
http://www.topp.org/species/white_shark/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Shark_Caf%C3%A9
http://www.marinecsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/domeier_nasby_lucas_meps.pdf
http://www.marinecsi.org/news-events/
I don't know how involved these guys were in this earlier research, but since they are shaka awesome bros, I am gunna pretend they did it all. If they didn't do it, the people they have been working with did.
Fiscer and the crew recently went to the place of my recent environmental intrigue.. the North Atlantic, Cape Cod to be precise (a friend of mine who was an east coast surfer once saw a dead Great White hauled up on a beach in New Hampshire and it cured him of surfing there forever, so I had heard they were around the east coast anecdotally, another friend more recently having found a dead one on the beach near Charleston where the real final battle depicted in the movie Glory took place, the attack on Ft. Wagner, well the beach has receded about a quarter mile, but pretty much there, but this was the true test, bro's!), ... and after a week of waiting, they hooked two pretty frisky females, Mary Lee and Genie... Genie, you know, she texts every once in a while, but Mary Lee, she gets around! And she updates about it! That man eater has no shame!
So to speculate that with only two sharks and 6 months worth of data, there does appear to be a theory forming in the frontal lobe of yours truly that they might be following the migrations of the Atlantic Right Whale, but seriousness aside for a minute, Mary Lee seems to love to check out beaches, and according to rumor, might have swum up into Charleston Harbor and the Wando River! My OSearch Ipad App, which I check like a rat in a crack experiment, at least once a day, does not reveal that track, although there is a gap in the data from last December, the 14th to the 16th where the allegation is possible. Was she perhaps doing a little secret Christmas shopping at the Charleston City Market and didn't want to tell us, or maybe more shocking, having a tryst like JFK in his Navy days in one of the old Cat Houses South of Broad! She might innocently proclaim she was just checking to make sure Steven Colbert's mom was doing OK, but Dear Lord thank goodness we weren't allowed to know!
Controversy aside, where are the OSearch Dudes going next? Well, they don't communicate well, you know, all that danger.. you gotta like.. you know.. keep it in-side, bro.. show no fear.. so we are like men of action.. we don't always like, talk about it, but we feel it, you know, it's like a wave....like a moment where everything.... a few of them are actually Alaskans, so I should have some respect, but it's too easy, but anyhow, after a long period of silence where they were docked up someplace in the Mid-Atlantic, the boys are on the move, to, well South Beach.. they are moored up on the South Tip of South Beach.. I can't make this up.. well, who can blame them. There's a lot of nature there.. Latina Film Stars need tracking too... but it appears they are headed to Jacksonville, even though they just passed it, on an educational mission, since if you watch the tracks, Mary Lee was actually sniffing around JAX beach a few weeks ago..
http://www.fox30jax.com/content/topstories/story/Two-Great-White-Sharks-spotted-off-Jax-Beach/aOC0jlfidka9FwE3ruLbkw.cspx
Whether they are going to trap sharks since it appears the two being tracked have already moved north, I can't tell, or maybe it's just an educational thing, but they are calling it Expedition Jacksonville and the countdown begins:
http://www.ocearch.org/ABOUTUS.html ( It can be hard to find their web page proper from the tracker, but it does exist...)
Where to next fellahs!? I vote Australia, but do me a fav and catch a few more east coast guys first... nature there needs a bit of stirring up... and I get a huge kick out of the thought of Snookie being grabbed and spit out because sharks can't digest silicone with me watching the pings live...
Update: Looks like they are back in Cape Cod, well, New Bedford (Nu Beige to the locals, once the richest town in America due to shipping and Whaling) but headed out to the elbow of Cape Cod where they caught Mary Lee and Genie last summer. It's a bit safe, doesn't blow a bunch of fuel, but I will agree.. 3 ain't enough, I want every accountant in the hamptons checking his Ocearch tracker every time he struts into the water for fear of his wife getting his life insurance policy if it covers shark attacks.. which he needs to ask his accountant!
Updated Update:
They traveled into the pacific... looking for sharks near the Galapagos.. it was kind of meh...
they have started to tag things other than Whites, like Maco's and Hammerheads.. it's Scientifically Awesome, but Visually Meh....and it tkaes away from the pure great white pleasure that is turning on every track from every white they have tagged, like 200 and watching all the lines all over the atlantic and Indian Oceans! Pure Titilation!
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