(TheRedAlertNews.com) – A new study has found the Southern California coastline is teeming with white sharks swimming very close to humans.
The new research, authored by scholars from the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), sought to determine how near sharks came to swimmers and how safe the Southern California beaches are from attacks.
The researchers used drones to observe the behavior of juvenile white sharks, the Associated Press reports.
They discovered that the marine predators tended to swim pretty close to people in the water – specifically, “almost within a bite radius.”
Even though the juvenile white sharks approach the swimmers, the study found that “it’s safe.”
According to Shark Lab, there were no cases of shark bites at any of the 26 beaches that the CSULB monitored between January 2019 and March 2021.
The scholars conducted about 1,500 drone flights during the two years, establishing that juvenile white sharks tended to gather primarily in two main spots along the Southern California coastline – in southern Santa Barbara County and central San Diego County.
Unlike them, adult white sharks generally lead a life of solitary animals.
In their two main gathering spots, the juvenile white sharks came close to the humans in the water on 97% of the days surveyed.
Often, the sharks would swim within 50 yards of the wave breaks, thus coming the closest to surfers and stand-up paddle boarders.
“Most of the time, water users didn’t even know the sharks were there, but we could easily see them from the air,” explained Patrick Rex, a CSULB graduate student who led the study.
“We never expected to see so many encounters every day with no incidents [of bites],” commented Chris Lowe, a marine biology professor and the Shark Lab’s director.
The report notes that the researchers’ findings confirmed that humans and sharks could coexist peacefully in the water.
“It’s not just about sharks, it’s about people. This study may change people’s perception of the risk sharks pose to people that share the ocean with them,” Lowe concluded.
