Check out Mary Landers’ piece in the Savannah Morning News: Great white sharks visited Tybee for holidays

And here’s some embedded media (all from a week to two weeks old) not only about Mary Lee, but also about Katharine and Genie:

The OCEARCH Shark Tracker is pretty interesting.

Well check out these latest images (click here if embed is glitchy):

On that same Facebook page, you can also see a rather gruesome pic of a dolphin that has had half of its body ripped away. It’s unclear if Mary Lee was responsible, but she has been in the general area.

Mary Lee weighs over 3500 pounds and is over 16 feet long.

Of course, I guess it’s worth remembering that we’re only actually seeing a handful of sharks in various parts of the world, and we’re only seeing the results of pings that determine their precise location.

Still, there’s plenty to here to capture the imagination.

Mary Lee — 16 feet long, 3400+ lbs. — was tagged in September 2012 off Cape Cod. Lydia — 14 feet, 2000 lbs. — was tagged in March 2013 off Cape Cod.

And both sharks appear to be regularly visiting waters along the Southeast coast.

Embedded via Facebook, here’s the most recent location for both Lydia and Mary Lee:

If you go to the shark tracker and look at their paths, you can see that the sharks’ ranges so far extend from Massachusetts to Florida and pretty far east into the Atlantic — out toward Bermuda or farther.

And here’s the latest from CBS about the tagging this week of great white Betsy, an immature female:

Most recently, OCEARCH tagged Lydia off the Florida coast as part of Expedition Jacksonville, which has been chronicled on the organization’s Facebook page.

You can follow the action at OCEARCH’s Global Shark Tracker.

And researchers have now posted this gripping, not-for-the-squeamish video of the tagging of Lydia. Of necessity, catching, tagging, and releasing a massive great white shark is kind of a brutal process. I guess we can assume from the ongoing pinging of the tagged fish that the process does no lasting damage.

OCEARCH is now tracking a number of great white sharks along America’s East Coast.

Mary Lee is a big great white shark — over 16 feet and 3500 pounds. If you click on through and sort the map to see Mary Lee’s travels, you’ll see that she’s been staying very near the coast, but traveling some pretty large distances.

A few days ago, of course, she made a stir with a close brush of Jacksonville Beach.

You can read a whole lot more about this project and see where Mary Lee and Genie have pinged at OCEARCH Tracking Central. Genie is not far east of Mary Ann.

There are also two tagged sharks that have pinged off the coast of Africa — one off Mozambique and one off South Africa.

More about OCEARCH:

Shark populations worldwide are under threat with significant declines in shark populations documented in areas where they were once common. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has determined that of the shark and ray species assessed, 30 percent are threatened or near-threatened with extinction. Conserving sharks is thus currently a global conservation priority and devising successful conservation and management strategies is largely limited by our scientific knowledge on their biology.

Significant information is lacking with regard to the medium and long range movement patterns of white sharks. Traditional research has focused on fine small scale movements of white sharks within known aggregation sites. Gaining this previously unattainable information enables more effective shark and ocean conservation and – protection of human life.

Our collaborative work with leading researchers and their institutions generates data in a number of areas pertaining to shark ecology.

UPDATE, Jan. 8, 6:40 p.m.:
This post has gotten a lot of hits today, so I wanted to be sure and update it. As of about two hours ago, Mary Lee had worked her way well away from shore — but still not too far off the coast at Jacksonville.

Here’s a screen cap of the most recent image from OCEARCH Global Shark Tracker:

UPDATE, 1/9:

A great interview with OCEARCH founder Chris Fischer on CNN: