Mysterious great white shark lair discovered in Pacific Ocean | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious great white shark lair discovered in Pacific Ocean

sfgate.com

227 pointstomcam26 comments

It's a good article but existence of the White Shark Café has been known for quite some time. I first read about it in The Devil's Teeth, a book (the only one?) about the Farallon Islands (20 miles west of San Francisco) where they actively study Great Whites.

They've known it was there since satellite tracker data indicated that in the 2000s. I guess what the article is talking about discovering is the Café part. They didn't know that there was food there or rather they didn't understand the food there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Shark_Caf%C3%A9

Sometimes I think it's better if some mysteries remained unsolved; can't wait until this is leaked to shark hunters and the "secret" habitat is decimated; humans are "wonderful" and "surprising" all the time...

No need for a leak. They make it pretty clear where the area is, so I suppose the paving can begin. If we kill them all then we no longer have to worry about what we don't know about them! /s

This is a persistent problem in the world of journalism, one that is rarely, if ever, addressed, that being the spreading of sensitive information that can lead to the detriment of the main subject of the article. Whether it is shark territory, secret military bases, or archaic socio-cultural enclaves, these pieces have the potential to disrupt them. For intel black sites, most people applaud the effect. For Yazidis and sharks, not so much.

At what point does it become unethical for attention hungry journalists to expose things like Sharklandia?

Information should never be criminalized. Bad behaviors like poaching endangered species, however, should. Information may be able to enable some of that, but it also enables positive behaviors as well. It’s the responsibility of civil society and governments to separate the two and prevent or disincentivize the bad.

Somebody builds a vile criminal enterprise on the back of some 'sensitive' information, and suddenly you cannot expose their atrocities without violating the law. And then you have the beginnings of a dystopian dictatorship.

It is a huge area in the open ocean. And the sharks are very deep. Anyone looking to harvest them commercially is going to have a very tough time finding them. They are concentrated by open ocean standards, but there are infinitely more sharks per cubic mile of water in other places (seal habitats). If an sport fisher wants to drop a line 1000 feet down in the middle of the pacific, have at it. They will catch/kill fewer at this cafe than they would off the coast.

Don't worry, the mass over fishing of oceans is way ahead of this.

I guess The Discovery Channel is going to save lots of money on travel expenses next Shark Week.

Everything about these fish is "mysterious". All we really know about them comes from behavior at the surface. Immature whites are rarely every seen. We don't know where the real tiny ones grow up. Mating behavior is a totally open book atm. Only recently have we learned that they move in loose packs.

I got a real kick out of a study that gave credence to the old surfer's adage "big waves, big shark". It turns out they like to recharge in the more oxygenated waters near breaking waves. Bigger and more territoriality dominant sharks hang out near the bigger waves.

why would any website owner think it’s ok to have self playing videos pop up on mobile in 2018?

The site was so abominably overrun with cruft and vicious pop-ups that I never even got to the auto-run video. Maybe after some ad-hunters go in and decimate the place, I might consider revisiting.

Try this instead then (originally published on SF Chronicle):

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Mysterious-great-wh...

I went to the site with javascript turned off and had a good experience.

Sadly, the web has degraded to the point that I no longer think it a good idea to turn javascript on for any but the most trusted sites.

If you enjoyed this article you may enjoy this video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bc-Cv9C-E8

For mobile readers you might get a faster and cleaner view of the same article on SF Chronicle:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Mysterious-great-wh...

Am I the only one who thinks "White Shark Café" is a great prey for hipster bands and also needs to be protected. A trademark, maybe?

And I thought itvwas Cape Cod.

Great whites have a hard time affording the passage fees for the Panama canal

"Lair" is more of a resting place than a gathering place.

A buffet may be both

Relevant.

https://youtu.be/Bh7bYNAHXxw

> in a patch of open ocean about the size of Colorado, a place that looked in satellite images like an empty, oceanic Sahara desert

So... Burning Shark.

Thanks for this. It made me giggle.

Unlike “Shark Cafe”.

“She named it the White Shark Cafe even though she wasn’t sure whether the sharks went there for food or sex.”

In that case she should have called it “Plenty Of Fish”...

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