By Susan Milius
A white shark’s big fat liver, which can plump up to more than a quarter of an animal’s body weight, turns out to be the fuel tank for extreme migrations.
White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the eastern Pacific take a springtime swim from California to Hawaii and return in late summer. A one-way, 4,000-kilometer trip takes about a month.
By combining data from two kinds of tracking tags attached to the animals, an unusual analysis shows that sharks fatten up for the demands of migration much the way birds do, says Gen Del Raye of the University of Hawaii in Manoa.