Named Contender, this marine super-predator, the largest ever recorded at 4.20 meters long and weighing 770 kilograms, is back in Florida. According to Ocearch, a non-profit marine research organization that tracks it with a tag placed on its dorsal fin, it has been wintering between Cape Canaveral and Port St. Lucie since January 1, 2026.
A great migrant
The SPOT (Smart Position or Temperature) tag was installed last January while he was wintering offshore along the continental shelf break between Cape Canaveral and Vero Beach. He remained there until mid-March 2025, but he is a great traveler, migrating according to water temperature. In one year, he traveled 8,500 kilometers back and forth along the East Coast of the United States and up to Canada.
The tag only picks up his signal when he comes to the surface: he was reported on July 17 near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then, after two months of silence, he was spotted very close to shore in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, between Quebec and Newfoundland, on September 29, 2025.
The area is located at the mouth of the Natashquan River, along the coastline of an Indigenous reserve. Food is abundant there, with harbour seals, harp seals, and Atlantic salmon.
According to Urgences Mammifères Marins, the Quebec network of organizations and institutions that work with marine mammals, the growing population of protected seals explains the increase in the number of cases of seals being attacked and eaten by sharks in recent years, which are also protected. It would therefore appear that the shark population is increasing in Canada.
Great white sharks, those other snowbirds
This is explained by Neil Hammerschlag, marine ecologist and president of Atlantic Shark Expeditions in Nova Scotia. This terrifying species of shark is, however, the only one capable of raising its body temperature higher than that of the water in which it lives.
Despite this, they “migrate south because the water becomes too cold for them. They behave like snowbirds and head south to spend the winter in warmer waters.”
Sharks then adapt their diet accordingly. There used to be monk seals in Florida waters, but this species is now extinct. Nowadays, their diet consists likely in schools of mackerel, tuna, and jacks, other small shark species, young dolphins, and prey that hide in deep water, such as squid.
A creature of habit
According to Ocearch’s studies of 48 great white sharks, this is a highly habitual species that uses the same sites every year. New England and Canada are summer feeding grounds. Florida and the Gulf of Mexico are wintering grounds.
According to Ocearch, several great whites tagged this fall near Nova Scotia are currently near the Carolinas, but two have headed straight for the Gulf of Mexico, and one of them, Ripple, is in the waters off New Orleans, heading towards the Florida’s Big Bend. Finally, Breton, a male measuring 3.96 m long and weighing 635 kgs when tagged in 2020, may already have surpassed Contender. Shortly after Christmas, he was last detected off Jacksonville.
Ocearch researchers estimate that Contender is in his early thirties, just entering his reproductive years.
