Great White Sharks Vanished From the Farallones in 2000 — Divers Found Only What They Left Behind

In October 2000, a cage-dive operator dropped into the water off the Farallon Islands and, for the first time in fourteen years, not a single great white came. The sharks were gone, the seals had packed themselves onto the rocks and wouldn’t enter the sea, and the chum slick lay untouched on a dead-flat ocean. A researcher’s tags told the exact hour: every great white left the islands in a single forty-minute window in the dark, all heading out toward the deep. One of them — a nineteen-foot female the team had tracked for six years — logged a sudden deep plunge and a spike of warmth before her tag went silent for good. If the apex predator of the whole California coast fled in the night from something no one ever saw, then whatever sits above it was close enough to shore to take one — so where is it the rest of the time?