Meet L-Town, a male great white shark that was recently detected off the coast of San Francisco. At 4 meters long (13 feet) long and 800 kilograms (1,765 pounds), L-Town is actually one of the smaller members of Shark Net, a new iPhone/iPad app that allows users to follow the Pacific’s greatest predators as they travel the oceans traversing a network of acoustic receivers.
“I realized we have one of the wildest places on Earth here in our own backyard,” says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara Block. “We have all these predators, but nobody can see them.”
“I think it’s a great initiative,” says behavioral ecologist David Jacoby, who is just finishing up his PhD at The Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom. “All good conservation practice should involve and stimulate the public interest, and this definitely does that.”
The project builds on the success of the Tagging ...
