Aquarium Returns Great White to the Wild

The great white shark has left the building.

After an eventful six months on display, a young female great white shark that set survival records in captivity while luring hordes of visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium was released Thursday in waters south of the facility.

The shark, outfitted with an electronic data tag that will track her movements for the next month, wore out her welcome by following nature’s course. She grew remarkably fast during her 198 days in captivity and began demonstrating a budding taste for her tank mates.

Having added more than a foot in length and 100 pounds since she arrived, the great white recently bit and killed two soupfin sharks in a two-week span. Aquarium officials said at the time that it was unclear if hunting was a factor in those deaths.

But early this week marine biologists witnessed indisputable predatory behavior, as the great white made unsuccessful attempts to chase down denizens of the million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit.

Worried that such behavior would only get worse and that the shark might soon grow too big to be safely moved, aquarium officials realized a day they long anticipated had arrived.

“Her time had come,” concluded Randy Kochevar, a marine biologist at the aquarium.

At 4 a.m. a team assembled for the shark’s well-orchestrated trip back to the wild.

Workers dipped nets into her sprawling tank, pulling out the thrashing female and putting her on a stretcher. Measuring 6 feet 4 inches from snout to tail, she was quickly moved to an oval-shaped tank that was rolled out and lifted by crane onto a flatbed truck, then transported to a nearby dock.

The final leg of her journey was aboard the aquarium’s workboat, the Lucile. The shark was loaded into the boat’s special “shark box,” which is covered in soft vinyl and flushed with oxygenated water. The young great white spent her final minutes in captivity riding the waves to a spot south of Monterey Bay, where she was released nearly two miles offshore.

Kochevar said the shark was “mostly quiescent” during the moving job, which he described as “really just a very graceful thing.”

Over the next month, the data recorder -- attached to the shark’s body near the dorsal fin -- will track her position and depth every two minutes. Eventually a metal link holding the tag will corrode and the transmitter will pop to the surface and send its accumulated information via satellite to aquarium computers.

The young female became the first great white in 37 attempts to survive more than a couple of weeks in captivity. Her arrival prompted a surge of interest -- and the shark taught the experts a few things.

As the shark dined mostly on salmon fillets and steaks, aquarium biologists tracked every ounce of food she consumed, allowing them to calculate how much energy a great white expends in swimming and basic metabolic functions. Such data is impossible to derive from sharks in the wild.

Kochevar said biologists were also astonished by how fast she grew. By the time of her release, the shark weighed 162 pounds.

The aquarium plans to continue a shark-tagging program this summer, and will attempt to bring back another great white for exhibit. Kochevar said aquarium officials justify the exhibition as an important tool in educating the public about the need to protect the great white and other endangered sharks.

But no replacement can displace memories of the recently departed female.

“I wish her nothing but the best,” Kochevar said.