Word: sommeran
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...changes in electric currents as tiny as five-billionths of a volt. They use this ability to hunt for prey hidden under the sand and to navigate according to the earth's magnetic field. "They are like some high-tech AWACS thing, with all their sensors," says Sean Van Sommeran, executive director of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, Calif. When they do attack a human, the weight of evidence now suggests, they have mistaken a person for a seal or some other prey, and most often will spit out human flesh after the first bite. The problem...
...keeps its body temperature 5[degrees]F to 10[degrees]F higher than that of the surrounding water by recycling heat from its swimming muscles. This allows great whites to hunt in cooler seas. "It seems to make them more vigorous," says Van Sommeran. The sharks are voracious eaters of seals when they patrol the Red Triangle--a 100-mile strip of California coast from Bodega Bay to Santa Cruz. They have enormous livers to store energy, and can go for months without eating. Nobody has seen great whites mate, but some biologists theorize that after fattening...
...Sommeran's team, collaborating with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory and the Hopkins Marine Center at Stanford University, is on the verge of finding where the great whites go after they leave the coast of California in the winter. Since 1999, the biologists have been attaching "pop-up tags" to great whites. These continually measure the shark's position, depth, speed and direction, and store the data in digital archives. After six months, the tiny computer in the tag sends an electric current through a magnesium burn wire, which dissolves in the seawater and allows...
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