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Legendary Shark: P.E.I. Great White Was Only A Teenager When She Died

By Effie Orfanides
Published on: 02:33 PST, Mar 10, 2015

A legendary shark on Discovery Channel’s list of top five sharks ever caught was only a teenager at the time. According to CBC, the Prince Edward Island shark caught in 1988 was only 20 years old when she died. Since studies have shown that Great White sharks live to be about 70, a 20-year-old shark is considered a teenager. These sharks don’t fully mature until they are about 30.

“New studies in the U.S. and Canada that examined the P.E.I. shark’s bones, along with others, show that sharks grow more slowly and mature much later than previously thought. The research gives precise dating of the age of sharks by looking for evidence of exposure to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s.”

The legendary shark was a female, and was about 20 feet long. The P.E.I. Great White was the second on the list, that included a 24-28 foot shark named Submarine, which actually doesn’t exist.

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the massive P.E.I. shark had “a lot of growing to do,” and would have been even bigger than she was when she was caught. This suggests that Great Whites, now an endangered species, could grow even bigger than previously thought.

According to the Discovery Channel, female white sharks are bigger than males because they need more girth in order to carry their offspring. She is the world’s largest accurately measured Great White, which makes her case not only fascinating, but one for researchers to study more closely.

While there does seem to be quite the fascination with sharks, the uptick in curiosity surrounding Great Whites was noticed over the past decade or so. With these huge predators making their way to areas like Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Guadalupe Island, people all over the world have become interested in learning more about these creatures, and what they do under the water’s surface. Eating, mating, and migratory habits have been studied for years, with the help of teams who catch sharks, tag them, and then release them back into the water.

[Photo courtesy of Edgar Jiménez from Porto, Portugal via Wikimedia Commons]

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