I read an article a year ago where researchers said they have probably been under counting GW’s. It’s notoriously hard to get numbers on fish in the sea, minus whales and dolphins. GW’s have been protected for nearly 20 years now and I’m sure there are more out there than we know.
Below is from the linked article. -Tom
This year, researchers also saw more shark activity in the early part of the season than has been witnessed in previous years.
“Most of the time things don’t begin happening in terms of numbers of white sharks really until mid-to-late July, and we had a lot of white sharks around in early July this year,” Skomal said. “So that gave us a couple to three weeks more of tagging as well. So that’s clearly the case where we had far more sharks, in our opinion, around in July than we had in previous years.”
Things slowed down near the end of July, but Skomal and Winton agreed that the activity appears to be picking back up again
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