Ramón Bonfil, Ph.D. Facing a great white shark in its natural environment is one of the most humbling and life-marking experiences one can ever have, as long as this is done under controlled and safe conditions. I know this from first-hand experience. In the last 5 years I have had the stunning honor of handling 17 live great white sharks with my own hands, all in the name of science. The most surprising fact people come to realize after seeing their first great white in the wild is that their typical behavior has nothing to do with the stereotype of ferocity and aggressiveness that has been force-fed to us through ‘killer shark’ movies and pseudo-documentaries. Great white sharks are surprisingly calm and cautious in their movements around cages with divers or with a boat floating at the surface. Only through skillful manipulation of bait can we provoke their aggressive behavior. After all, they are top predators and nobody likes to be teased when hungry. Why would anyone want to wrestle with live great whites for a living? The answer is surprisingly simple: because these vilified fish are under threat of extinction and we know very little about their biology and ecology. Despite their iconoclastic fame in pop culture, great white sharks are still largely a mystery to science. The research we and other scientists around the world are conducting on the movements and migrations of great white sharks by using cutting-edge satellite tags and other electronic instruments is allowing us to map, better than ever, the ways in which they utilize the ocean and how they move in this vast environment. Until very recently everyone thought that great whites were chiefly a coastal species that only seldom would venture into the high seas. But thanks to satellite tagging studies like the one we just started in Guadalupe Island, Mexico, we know now that great white sharks have a diversity of spatial behaviors that include fidelity to very specific coastal areas for months at a time in addition to regular coastal migrations covering thousands of miles. More surprisingly, we discovered that great white sharks migrate across entire oceans and back. On February 2003, one of the sharks we tagged in South Africa crossed the entire Indian Ocean to the coast of Western Australia, and then crossed right back to South Africa, covering more than 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) in less than 9 months!