The Secret Lives of Great White Sharks

Each fall and winter, adult and sub-adult white sharks gather predictably around pinniped colonies along the Central California coast, giving researchers a rare, consistent window into their lives. That reliability has made this one of the longest running white shark study sites anywhere in the world.

A team of researchers from the Block Lab at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, including Sammy Andrzejaczek, Raksha Doddabele, Evan Byrnes, Alexandra DiGiacomo, and Sabrina Daley, will share more than two decades of findings on how these sharks patrol the coast. More recently, dedicated surveys within Monterey Bay itself have revealed an entirely new chapter: how juvenile white sharks grow up before joining the adult population offshore.

The team will walk through their toolkit, electronic tagging, drone surveys, photo identification, and environmental DNA, and what these methods have revealed about shark movement, migration, population trends, and the role these predators play in California's marine ecosystems.