The best selling novel Jaws and the subsequent blockbuster film by Steven Spielberg depicted the great white shark as a "ferocious man eater". In reality, humans are not the preferred prey of the great white shark.
The IUCN treats the great white shark as vulnerable, while it is included in Appendix II of CITES.
Great White Shark Facts
Males reach maturity at 3.5–4.0 metres (11–13 ft), and females at 4.5–5.0 metres (15–16 ft). Adults on average are 4–5.2 metres (13–17.1 ft) long and have a mass of 680–1,100 kilograms (1,500–2,400 lb). Females are generally larger than males. It is widely accepted that the great white shark can approach 6.1 m (20 ft) in length and 1,900 kg (4,200 lb) in weight.[3] However, the maximum size is still subject to hot debate because such reports are often rough estimations or speculations performed under questionable circumstances.
For several decades, many ichthyological works, as well as the Guinness Book of World Records, listed two great white sharks as the largest individuals: a 10.9 m (36 ft) great white captured in Southern Australian waters near Port Fairy in the 1870s, and a 11.3 m (37 ft) shark trapped in a herring weir in New Brunswick, Canada in the 1930s. Some researchers question these measurements' reliability, noting they were much larger than any other accurately reported sighting. The New Brunswick shark may have been a misidentified basking shark, as the two have similar body shapes. The question of the Port Fairy shark was settled in the 1970s, when J. E. Randall examined the shark's jaws and "found that the Port Fairy shark was of the order of 5 m (17 ft) in length and suggested that a mistake had been made in the original record, in 1870, of the shark's length".
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_white_shark
Great White Shark Facts
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