Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias): Facts and Size

What does a great white shark look like?

The great white is a heavy, torpedo-shaped shark with a pointed, cone-shaped snout, long gill slits and a tall, triangular first dorsal fin. Its tail is shaped like a crescent, with two lobes of almost equal size and a strong ridge, or keel, on each side of the tail base. This body plan is built for powerful, efficient swimming.

Despite the name, only the belly is white. The back and sides are slate gray to gray-brown, and the line where the dark back meets the white underside is often sharp and irregular. This countershading makes the shark hard to see from above against dark water and from below against the bright surface. The undersides of the pectoral fins usually have black tips.

Its mouth holds about 300 teeth arranged in rows. The upper teeth are broad, triangular and serrated like a steak knife, ideal for cutting chunks from large prey, while the lower teeth are narrower and help grip. Teeth are lost and replaced throughout life. Unlike many sharks, the great white has no protective third eyelid; it rolls its eyes back into its head when it strikes.

How big do great white sharks get?

Females grow larger than males. Males mature at about 3.4–4 m (11–13 ft) and usually weigh 680–1,000 kg (1,500–2,200 lb), while females mature at about 4.6–4.9 m (15–16 ft) and typically weigh 1,000–1,900 kg (2,200–4,200 lb). Pups are born at about 1–1.6 m (3–5 ft) long.

A 2014 review of catch records found the longest reliably measured white shark to be 6.02 m (19.8 ft) and the heaviest 2,530 kg (5,580 lb). Older claims of 10–11 m (33–37 ft) giants were exaggerations or mistakes. The full story of records and famous individuals is in How big do great white sharks get?

The great white is not the largest shark. Two filter feeders, the whale shark and the basking shark, grow longer, as the list of the largest fish in the world shows. Among sharks that hunt large animals, though, none living today is bigger.

Where do great white sharks live?

White sharks live in temperate and subtropical seas around the world, and occasionally in tropical and colder waters. They are most common off central California and Guadalupe Island in Mexico, along the US East Coast from Florida to Cape Cod and Atlantic Canada, around South Africa, southern Australia and New Zealand, and in parts of the Mediterranean Sea.

They use both coasts and open ocean. Adults gather near islands and headlands with seal and sea lion colonies, such as the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, Seal Island in South Africa’s False Bay and the Neptune Islands in South Australia. Young sharks prefer warmer, shallower coastal water. White sharks usually stay in the upper few hundred meters but can dive to more than 1,000 m (3,300 ft).

They are great travelers. One female tagged in South Africa swam to Western Australia and back, a round trip of about 20,000 km (12,400 mi), in under nine months. Sharks from California spend part of each year offshore in an area halfway to Hawaii nicknamed the White Shark Café. On the US East Coast, white sharks move north to New England in summer and south toward Florida in winter, and the rise in gray seal numbers off Cape Cod since the 1970s has made the area a summer hotspot.

A warm-bodied shark

Most fish are the same temperature as the water around them. The great white belongs to the mackerel shark family, Lamnidae, whose members can keep parts of the body warm. Heat made by their dark swimming muscles is held in by a countercurrent heat exchanger, a dense net of blood vessels called a rete mirabile, where warm blood leaving the muscles heats cold blood arriving from the gills.

In one study, white sharks swimming in water of 13–16 °C (55–61 °F) had stomach temperatures of about 25–27 °C (76–80 °F). A warm body helps the shark swim faster, digest food quickly and hunt in cold, seal-rich waters. White sharks also have a huge, oily liver that can make up about a quarter of their body weight. It stores energy for long journeys and helps keep the shark from sinking, since sharks have no swim bladder.

What do great white sharks eat?

The great white is an opportunistic predator, and its diet changes as it grows. Young sharks under about 3 m (10 ft) eat mainly fish, rays, smaller sharks and squid. Larger sharks add marine mammals, especially seals and sea lions, along with dolphins, porpoises, seabirds and sea turtles. They also scavenge dead whales, and many sharks may feed on one carcass at once.

White sharks usually hunt seals by ambush. A shark cruises near the seabed, spots the silhouette of a seal against the bright surface and rushes upward. Off South Africa, the strike is often so fast that the shark leaps completely out of the water, a behavior called breaching, sometimes rising up to about 3 m (10 ft) into the air. Off Cape Cod, white sharks hunt gray seals in shallow, murky water close to the beach.

Big, fat-rich prey suits a big, warm-bodied shark. A large meal can keep a white shark going for days or even weeks. White sharks sometimes bite low-fat animals such as sea otters without eating them, possibly because they judge them not worth the effort.

Behavior and senses

White sharks are usually seen alone, but they often gather where food is plentiful and seem to have a social order based on size. They communicate with body language, such as swimming side by side or showing off their flank, and may settle disputes over food by slapping the water with their tails rather than fighting.

They have keen senses. Smell, eyesight, hearing and the lateral line, which detects movement in the water, help them find prey from a distance. At close range, jelly-filled pores on the snout called ampullae of Lorenzini pick up the weak electric fields of living animals. White sharks often raise their heads above the surface, a behavior called spyhopping, apparently to look around.

They must keep moving to breathe. The great white is a ram ventilator: water flows over its gills only while it swims with its mouth slightly open.

Reproduction and lifespan

Little is known about how white sharks mate, and no one has filmed it with certainty. Females give birth to live young after a pregnancy thought to last about a year. Inside the mother, the embryos hatch from eggs and feed first on yolk and then on unfertilized eggs. Litters of about 2–10 pups have been recorded, and females probably give birth only every two or three years.

Growth is slow. A 2015 study of sharks from the northwest Atlantic found that males mature at about 26 years and females at about 33 years. Radiocarbon dating of vertebrae suggests that white sharks can live more than 70 years, far longer than once believed, as explained in How long do great white sharks live?

Predators and threats

Healthy adult white sharks have only one regular natural predator: the orca. Orcas killed a white shark at the Farallon Islands in 1997, and since 2017 pairs and small groups of orcas off South Africa have killed several white sharks and eaten their livers. White sharks often abandon an area for weeks after orcas appear. How the two predators compare is covered in orca vs great white shark.

People are a far bigger threat. White sharks are caught as bycatch in longlines, gillnets and trawls, and in the past they were targeted as trophies and for their jaws, teeth and fins. In Australia and South Africa, nets and baited lines set to protect swimming beaches still kill white sharks. Slow growth and few young mean that populations take decades to recover.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classes the great white shark as Vulnerable worldwide, after declines in many regions over the past century. In European and Mediterranean waters, the species is assessed as Critically Endangered, with sightings now rare.

South Africa became the first country to protect white sharks in 1991, and protection has followed in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union. International trade is controlled under CITES Appendix II. Protection has helped some populations recover, especially along the US East Coast and off California, where growing numbers of gray seals and sea lions also provide food.

Are great white sharks dangerous to people?

The white shark causes more recorded bites on people than any other shark. The International Shark Attack File lists about 350 confirmed unprovoked white shark bites since records began, 59 of them fatal. Most bites happen to surfers and swimmers in cool waters off California, Australia and South Africa.

Even so, the risk is extremely small. People are not normal prey, and many bites are a single exploratory bite after which the shark leaves. Scientists still debate whether sharks mistake surfers for seals or are simply investigating an unfamiliar object. The real numbers are explained in How often do sharks attack humans? Following local warnings and avoiding seal colonies cuts the risk further. Anyone bitten needs emergency medical help immediately: call 911 (US), 112 (EU) or 999 (UK).

Myths and facts

Myth: great whites are man-eaters. The 1974 novel Jaws and the 1975 film made the species famous as a hunter of people. In reality, white sharks do not seek out humans, and author Peter Benchley later worked to protect sharks.

Myth: a great white can smell one drop of blood from miles away. Sharks do have a keen sense of smell and can detect some substances in very low concentrations, but scent has to drift to them on currents, so the miles-away claim is an exaggeration.

Fact: they have to keep swimming. Because the great white breathes by ram ventilation, it cannot rest on the seabed like a nurse shark.

Fact: they outlived a giant relative. Modern white sharks appeared about 5–6 million years ago and shared the seas with megalodon, which died out about 3.6 million years ago.