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🦈Conservation pressure

Great white shark · Apex lamnid whose warm muscle, broad diet and 1975 cinema still outrun the tagging papers.

At a glance
Score intensity

Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.

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Quick answers

Did Jaws change great-white numbers or only stories?

The 1975 film increased trophy interest and beach fear. Later decline drivers are fins, bycatch and slow life history. Benchley later argued the fiction had been taken as a brief.

What is the White Shark Cafe?

A mid-Pacific patch where California-tagged whites linger. Foraging on midwater squid and fish is the working hypothesis, not a seal colony.

Are great whites warm-blooded?

They are regional endotherms. Countercurrent heat exchangers keep muscle and stomach above ambient -- not mammalian homeothermy.

Why Gansbaai and the Farallones?

Cape fur seals and elephant seals create predictable prey. Cage tourism and research boats stacked on those same reefs.

Who is Deep Blue?

A very large female photographed at Guadalupe and later Hawaii -- a media name, not a stock assessment.

When did CITES list the species?

Appendix II in 2004. Papers still move; the listing forces permits and data, not a zero quota.

IUCN: Vulnerable

The great white shark future is a triad of climate, take and attention -- not a product roadmap.

Risk scores here track conservation pressure relative to other types. High resilience types sit in a calmer band; CR/EN types do not.

Conservation risk

76 / 100
threatened

Great white shark sits in a threatened band in this atlas (resilience 33/100). Vulnerable globally; Farallones, Gansbaai and Neptune Islands aggregations are better counted than oceanic juveniles.

Teaching snapshot as of September 2026 — not a live IUCN feed.

Safeguards

Listing and enforcement

CITES, ESA, RFMOs and national parks only work when patrols and papers move.

Site protection

A breeding lake, ice type or cavity tree cannot be replaced by a logo.

Prey and forage base

Seals, krill, ungulates, bamboo and sardines are the quiet half of the great white shark budget.

Disease and toxin watch

Ebola, KHV, TTX, lead and rodenticides are type-specific ceilings.

English-language science capacity

The field sites in the techDeep lens still train the next census -- they are a safeguard only if funded.

What monitoring automates first

Census and acoustics

Camera traps, radar and moorings already take hours that used to be only notebooks.

Trade-document checks

eBCD and permit databases can flag a loin or a skin faster than a paper file.

Outbreak mapping

Flu and Ebola desks now run on shared dashboards -- still needing a human closer.

Visitor flow

Ticketing and hide cameras can be scheduled; habituation ethics cannot be fully automated.

Structural shifts

Climate as habitat law

Ice, bleach and river heat are now listing factors, not background weather.

From fortress to corridor

National parks plus gene flow -- panda belts, tiger landscapes, wolf packs on roads.

Fame as a take risk

Nemo, Jaws, Koko and Cecil still move capture, fear and donations in the same year.

English science is not the range

The localLens is a reading aid. Range-state languages still hold the living animal.

Outlook

Near term

Expect more listings, more cameras and more conflict paperwork -- not a sudden best-species ending.

Medium term

Sites that keep forage and enforcement will hold; single-lake and single-forest types stay brittle.

Long view

The great white shark body plan will remain recognisable. The map of secure versus threatened populations will not.

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