Great white sharks are making their way through Southern California waters. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
If you spend time in the ocean off Southern California, you’re spending time with great white sharks. It’s not a maybe. They are there, but for the most part, they’re not anything to be worried about. It’s very likely that you’ve had a close encounter without knowing you’ve had one, especially at certain times of the year. Carlos Gauna spends a lot of his time searching for great whites off that iconic coastline, so he knows a little better than most. This year, though, things are a bit different.
“Massive great white sharks are being seen closer to shore than most people realize,” he wrote, “and not just juvenile sharks. In this video, I document multiple encounters with large, fully grown great white sharks cruising along the Southern California coastline, including some of the busiest beaches in Los Angeles. These sharks aren’t lingering… they’re passing through.”
It’s a well-known fact that parts of the coastline are great white nurseries. The Santa Monica Bay, for example. It’s common to see young whites cruising the shallows, practicing their hunting for when they move into deeper waters as they age.
“For years, areas like Santa Monica Bay have been known as nursery grounds for juvenile white sharks,” Gauna continued. “But after spending thousands of hours filming and tracking sharks from above, I’ve started to notice a different pattern — one that suggests these waters are not just nurseries, but also active travel routes for adult sharks.”
There are a lot of factors that might explain the changes in behavior Gauna documented — water temperature, prey movement, and the generally changing conditions off the California coastline, but Gauna doesn’t want this video to scare anyone.
“This isn’t about fear,” he finished. “It’s about understanding what’s really happening just off our beaches.”
