June 10, 2017 — Most of the millions of beachgoers who flock to southern California’s coast never notice the baby sharks swimming laps just offshore, but that’s starting to change.
The sharks aren’t on the prowl for sunblock-glazed snacks: the Southern California Bight – the coastal waters from Santa Barbara to the U.S.-Mexico border – is a white shark nursery.
It’s where the young predators hide out, stay warm, and learn to hunt, before joining adults in deeper seas.
Though their species has long been declining, baby white sharks are making a surprising comeback in the Bight.
Their return tells a bigger environmental success story: federal and state regulations stretching back 40 years have curtailed pollution and repaired the marine food web that includes white sharks (formerly called great white sharks). “You can’t have an ecosystem that’s badly damaged and have predators,” Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University-Long Beach, says.
The Bight’s baby white sharks declined for a number of reasons, Lowe says: poor water quality, their decimation as gillnetting bycatch, and the near-extirpation of the prey that adult sharks rely on.
Likewise, no single environmental law saved them. Instead, a suite of regulations enacted from the 1970s to the mid 1990s helped restore southern California’s coastal ecosystem enough for its white shark nursery to eventually start recovering.