Many have tried to keep a white shark in captivity. Here’s why that’s so difficult.
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There are several aquariums around the world, including one in Georgia, that house whale sharks, the biggest fish in the sea. But not one has a great white shark on display.
Aquariums have made dozens of attempts since the 1970s to display a captive great white shark. Most of those attempts ended with dead sharks.
By the 2000s, the only group still trying was the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which spent a decade planning its white shark program. In 2004, it acquired a shark that became the first great white to survive in captivity for more than 16 days. In fact, it was on display for more than six months before it was released back into the ocean.
In the following years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium hosted five more juvenile white sharks for temporary stays before ending the program in 2011. It was an expensive effort and had come under criticism due to injuries that some of the sharks developed in the tank.
Responding to those critics, Jon Hoech, the aquarium’s director of husbandry operations, said: “We believe strongly that putting people face to face with live animals like this is very significant in inspiring ocean conservation and connecting people to the ocean environment. We feel like white sharks face a significant threats out in the wild and our ability to bring awareness to that is significant in terms of encouraging people to become ocean stewards.”
Check out the video above to learn why white sharks are so difficult to keep in captivity and how the Monterey Bay Aquarium designed a program that could keep them alive.
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Comments
23 responses to “Why no aquarium has a great white shark”
They can't survive in captivity.
i learnt so much <3
LEAVE THEM BE!!!!!!
please dont go to aquariums.
Oh no! I am shocked and appalled. This is horrifying in terms of animal welfare. I just watched Meg 2 in movie theaters. The beggining of the movie depics a megladon shatk in a tank. It escapes shortly afterward. I think that is a bad idea. Sharks seem too active to do well in captivity. The closest real life parrellel is having a great white shark in captivity. I was curious on how that would work. This video confirmed my suspicians. It even shows that things are even worse than I thought.
One good parellel to the great white shark is the orca. They have a lot of superficial similarities. They do look very similar. They have the same basic lifestyle. Both are apex predators. Both are crusers in the open ocean. I Googled both animals. I found that both have phenominal endurance. They swim tens of miles every day. This video even shows specific animals in the diet in a great white shark. The adult diet has stuff that an orca would totally eat. There is a big diffence in terms classification though. Sharks belong in a primitive offshoot of vertibrites. This group is called chrondoicthys. This group also has rays and ratfish. Orcas are mammals instead. They are also very intellegent and social. These features make orcas similar to humans. So some anthropomorphizing of orcas is appropriate. It is cool that such distantly related animals can seem so similar. This is called convergent evolution. It blows my mind. My favorite example is actually sharks, dolphins and icthosaurs. Orcas fit in there too. They are essentially giant dolphins that have become apex predaters. Ray finned fish have thier own versions, which are tuna and swordfish.
We've had different one's in our Aquarium every few month's from young then we release them. The trouble we go through aint worth it
seen a great white when i was 5, in an aquarium. it was illegally transported to a now bulldozed aquarium inside a zoo. it died shortly after we left the site. this was in england, i dont think anyone knew about it until it died & they tried to release it’s corpse back into open water.
To save 6 minutes of your time, Great white sharks are used to traveling long distances and we know building a huge aquarium like that is going to be a problem because of the money and space needed, also they can hurt them selves bumping into the glass searching for more space. Thats why its better to keep them in the ocean instead.
Why not just leave them in uhh i dunno the OCEAN!
Me who has been here 7 years ago and putting a comment now🗿
You can not capture a body if the soul was meant to be free from the very beginning.
i came to love animals from just watching shows, obviously we had Steve Irwin, who made me love all animals, i think in all my life ive been to a zoo twice, when i see lions pacing up and down, and knowing why it is theyre doing that, actually makes me sad
This is sad. I would be happy if no aquarium ever housed those sharks again.
As someone who works in the museum field (of which zoos and aquaria are a subfield), this seems to breach every ethical code I've signed on to. Can you imagine if a history museum was like "let's continue to acquire artifacts so we can keep purposefully destroying them"? Pretty sure our accreditation would get stripped and we'd stop getting grants…
Ok why not we just build an aquarium in the ocean, it sounds very hard and expensive but if you just moved the shark from one part of the ocean to another, it shouldn’t be that hard
I could only see keeping sharks and other fish being humitarian if there was an outisde room for them to go thats at least a mile wide long 5 then they can go back to the zoo for feeding
This practice should be illegal
what a creature – can Not leave without freedom !
i think that it's okay that we learned what would happen if we tried, but what we learned was that it's not possible or humane to keep a great white, or any other large shark, in a tank – if we learn that lesson then i can be okay with us having done this to those sharks. i'm just worried that we won't
This is so sad. Just leave them where they belong, the ocean.
Let the sharks live in peace!
Im abit slow, can someone clarify/enlighten me? So despite being able to mimic their natural environment and dietary requirements, some sharks still pass on due to..what? because of their swimming habits? 🙁
If a constrained space means the shark dies, and if the totality of the earth’s oceans is an extended constrained space, would an infinitely large ocean allow a shark to live forever?