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Great White - 03
zaheer2alvi - 9/10/2007 3:14 PM
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Category: Educational
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The Great White Shark has a robust large conical-shaped snout. It has almost the same size upper and lower lobes on the tail fin (like most mackerel sharks, but unlike most other sharks). Great White Sharks display countershading, having a white underside and a grey dorsal area (sometimes in a brownish or bluish shade). The colouration makes it difficult for prey to spot the shark because it breaks up the shark`s outline when seen from a lateral perspective. When viewed from above the darker shade blends in with the sea and when seen from below casts a minimal silloutte against the sunlight. Great White Sharks, like many other sharks, have rows of teeth behind the main ones, allowing any that break off to be rapidly replaced. A Great White Shark`s teeth are serrated and when the shark bites it will shake its head side to side and the teeth will act as a saw and tear off large chunks of flesh. Great White Sharks often swallow their own broken off teeth along with chunks of their prey`s flesh. A typical adult Great White Shark measures 4 to 4.8 metres (13 to 16 ft) with a typical weight of 680 to 1,100 kilograms (1,500 to 2,450 lbs), females generally being larger than males. The maximum size of the Great White Shark has been subject to much debate, conjecture, and misinformation. Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker, both academic shark experts, devote a full chapter in their book, The Great White Shark (1991), to analysing various accounts of extreme size. Today, most experts contend that the Great White Shark`s "normal" maximum size is about 6 metres (20 ft), with a "normal" maximum weight of about 1,900 kilograms (4,200 lb). For several decades, many ichthyological works, as well as the Guinness Book of World Records, listed two great white sharks as the largest individuals caught: an 11 metre (36 ft) great white captured in South Australian waters near Port Fairy in the 1870s, and an 11.3 metre (37.6 ft) shark trapped in a herring weir in New Brunswick, Canada in the 1930s. While this was the commonly accepted maximum size, reports of 7.5 to 10 metre (25 to 33.3 ft) Great White Sharks were common and often deemed credible