The TOPP white shark team made headlines today with a landmark publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B.  The study, entitled, “Philopatry and migration of Pacific white sharks,” utilized satellite tagging, passive acoustic monitoring and genetic tags to study the migration and population structure of white sharks in the northeastern Pacific over the years from 2000-2008. 

I recently had the good fortune to spend two days 'on the water' with the Pt. Reyes white shark tagging project.

Nicole Teutschel at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, CA-- Elephant seals have made a big splash in the Ocean, in Google Earth. Today Google launched an Ocean platform in Google Earth!

TOPP has contributed stories, figures, and satellite data to Ocean. This partnership is geared towards enabling everyone to be able to better visualize tracking data, and of course... explore the Oceans right from their computer!

Jane Stevens, in Berkeley, CA - Check out "Tagging of Pacific Predators" on KQED-TV's QUEST!

Jane Stevens at Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, CA - In case you missed seeing this video of the baby white shark who was released from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, it's worth taking a look. He ate salmon steaks -- "restaurant quality" -- which were suspended from a pole by a thread. That diet helped him grow 13 inches in the six months he lived at the aquarium. Here's the link to the video.

Jane Stevens at Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, CA - Faster than a speeding squid, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's young white shark blasted south when he was released on Feb. 5. In just 44 days, he "made it safely past fishing grounds on the Pacific coast of California and the Baja Peninsula, rounded Cabo San Lucas and is heading toward the Mexican mainland," according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Jane Stevens, at Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, CA - In case you missed it, the white shark at the Monterey Bay Aquarium now lives in the Pacific Ocean again. He swam back into the Pacific yesterday at dawn, and the moment was caught by the aquarium's Tyson Rininger. The shark ended up in the aquarium after entangling in a fisherman's net on August 4, 2007. The fisherman alerted aquarium staff, who put him in a large ocean pen of Malibu, where he showed that he was healthy, and then put him on display at the aquarium on August 28.

Jane Stevens in Berkeley, CA. Sometimes reporters do stupid things. Take Rodney Hartman, for example. He's a reporter with The Star, one of 14 newspapers owned by Independent News & Media in South Africa. He wrote a story about a series of shark attacks that occured 50 years ago. Here's a PDF that Submerge Magazine put on its site.

Jane Stevens at TOPP.org. Allow me to brag a bit....our web site was among the top winners in TheScientist.com Laboratory Web Site and Video Awards. Out of 60 entries, six sites took honors. TOPP.org received the “Best of the Web” for three of the seven Judge’s Choice awards, with four lab sites receiving one each of the remaining judges’ votes.

Join the first White Shark Webcast at noon, Pacific time, this Friday, Nov. 16. White shark researcher Sal Jorgensen, Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibit curator John O'Sullivan and aquarium storyteller Ken Peterson will answer all your shark questions.

You'll also learn about the dangers that white sharks face in the ocean, and what the aquarium is doing to help.

They'll start with a live audio slide show that features the young white shark who's living in the aquarium's Outer Bay Exhibit, and then open the Webcast to your questions.