White Sharks

The Great White Shark is a type of shark. It is the biggest shark on earth. They can measure up to 7.4 m, and weight 3 tons. These great sharks can hunt as soon as they are born. While young they eat small fishes but when grown up they need larger preys, typically aquatic mammals, as seals. 

White sharks attack their preys from behind. They wait until the prey is calmed, then they start swimming at a angle of 90º towards it. Their color help them with this strategy: they have grey backs and white bellies, so its very difficult to see them from above. Sharks have a very elastic skin that let its muscles to move very quickly, so they can propel themselves out of the water, even 10 feet up!

These animals are very intelligent and use super senses to detect their preys from miles away. For example, they can smell the scent of a single drop of blood up to 3 miles away. They have a very specialized hearing that they use to detect the struggle of a wounded animal in the water. As every moving animal produces an electric field in water, sharks also have an electric field detector around their bodies .

White sharks are born in south african waters but when they grow up, they emigrate to the Australian Reef.

Even though white sharks seem very dangerous, humans kill more sharks per year, than sharks kill humans in the same period, (1 year). The average number of humans killed by sharks is 5 per year, in contrast with 20,000 sharks killed by humans per year.

But, if you thing white sharks are scary then what to say about their ancestors? They would be astonishing evil. The biggest of their ancestors was called Megalodon, that measured up to 30m long and had a mouth nearly twice the hight of a 1.80m man.

Sharkopedia have recently illustrated Megalodon versus Great white size. In the picture beyond, you can see the difference of size. Megalodon could grow 3 times bigger tan the biggest white shark known.