In On The Kill Taker

Great white sharks have some things in common with human serial killers, a new study says they don't attack at random, but stalk specific victims, lurking out of sight. We'll I'm no shark, but that's pretty much how I operate when out at a bar...

The sharks hang back and observe from a not-too-close, not-too-far base, hunt strategically, and learn from previous attempts, according to a study in the Journal of Zoology. Researchers used a serial killer profiling method to figure out just how the ancient predator hunts, something that's been hard to observe beneath the surface.

"There's some strategy going on," said a study co-author who observed 340 great white shark attacks on seals off an island in South Africa. "It's more than sharks lurking at the water waiting to go after them." The sharks feeding at Seal Island could have just hovered right where the seals congregated if they were random killers-of-opportunity, but they weren't. The sharks had a distinct modus operandi. They were focused. They stalked from a usual base of operations, 100 yards from their victims. It was close enough to see their prey, but not close enough to be seen and scare off their victims. They attacked when the lights were low. They liked their victims young and alone. They tried to attack when no other sharks were around to compete. They learned from previous kills. And they attacked from below, unseen.

The entire shark-serial killer connection is something right out of a crime novel. In fact, after one detailed the relatively new field of geographic profiling, which tries to find criminals by looking for patterns in where they strike, the same was applied to shark strategy. Observing sharks from sunrise to sunset, the applied idea of geographic profiling showed there was some real stalking going on. Older sharks did better and were more stealthy than younger, smaller sharks, demonstrating that learning was occurring. The study focused on just one location, but the same principles are likely to be applied to other shark hunting grounds. They can't really apply to shark attacks on people because those are so infrequent, but if you could figure out the base of operations for the great whites, it would give you a good idea of places to avoid if you were worried about shark attacks.