(CNN) — A 12-foot great white shark was sighted this week off the coast of South Carolina, about a year after it was spotted off the coast of New Jersey.
Ironbound, an adult white shark weighing about 539 kilos, was recorded twice off South Carolina on Thursday morning, according to OCEARCH, a nonprofit marine research group that provides open-source data on shark migration. .
(Credit: OCEARCH)
The shark was first tagged on October 3, 2019 in the waters around Nova Scotia and named after the Canadian island of West Ironbound.
OCEARCH captures and places sharks on a tracker that beeps each time they surface, an effort aimed at improving data collection.
Last year, at the end of April, Ironbound was detected off the coast of New Jersey. At the time, the shark was about 20 years old, explains Bob Hueter, OCEARCH’s chief scientist.
Since being tagged, Ironbound has swum some 24,400 km, OCEARCH data shows.
White sharks in the Atlantic Ocean migrate each year, spending summers in northern waters near Canada and winters as far south as the eastern Gulf of Mexico, according to Hueter.
Zoe Sottile contributed to this report.
