After a young white shark was spotted off the Newport Beach coast, a renowned marine biologist warned Southern California residents that many more sightings could happen by the end of summer.<\/p>\n
“It is gearing up to be a sharky summer,” said Chris Lowe, the director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lowe said Southern California’s beaches act as a nursery for young sharks, many of whom are staying in the area because of the recent heatwaves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The water is unusually warm for this time of year, and it’s formed what we call a marine heat wave,” Lowe said. “Oceanographers believe that we are going to have a strong El Ni\u00f1o this year. The last time we experienced this was 2015.”<\/p>\n
The warmer waters mean Southern California residents could expect more encounters between sharks and swimmers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Baja got so warm in 2015 that it pushed a lot of these white sharks in Southern California; some of them went all the way to Monterey,” Lowe said. “That is looking to be very similar to what we are already seeing now.”<\/p>\n
White shark sightings are up along Southern California’s busiest beaches. Lowe said shark attacks are still extremely rare.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“What we think is going on is these sharks are around people all the time,” Lowe said. “We don’t pose a threat to them, and we don’t smell or sound like food, so they ignore us.”<\/p>\n
The marine biologist added that the more white sharks in the water and increased sightings point to something hopeful.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The fact they’re here means our oceans are getting healthier,” Lowe said. “In California, we have done a good job of managing our fisheries, cleaning up pollution and things like that. Actually making the ecosystem healthier, and we know that because we have white sharks here.”<\/p>\n
Lowe said the young sharks don’t know how to hunt yet and are sticking to eating stingrays. However, they are wild animals and will hurt someone if they feel threatened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a young white shark was spotted off the Newport Beach coast, a renowned marine biologist warned Southern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-240473","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}