AFRICA: Lydia has her own Twitter account and a dorsal fin tracker that over the last two years has given scientists and the public first ever details about great white sharks.
Since she was tagged with a locator device off Jacksonville, Fla., on March 3, 2013, Lydia has travelled more than 56,000 kilometres over the mid-Atlantic ridge toward Europe and western Africa then back again.
She appears to be navigating an uncannily accurate pattern that had her making a beeline for the Florida coast almost exactly two years to the day she was tagged. In both years she swam from the southeastern United States up to the waters off Newfoundland before heading out into the open North Atlantic.
Almost 3,000 Twitter fans are following the five-metre, 1,400-kilogram shark believed to be in her late 20s or early 30s. They can trace Lydia’s exploits each time her fin breaks water, pinging new data by satellite to computer trackers.
Emerging is a long term view of one of the ocean’s top predators that is revamping what researchers thought they knew.
