White Shark Café
Who doesn’t like hanging out at a café, eating and meeting
friends? But do you travel thousands of
miles to your Pete’s or Starbucks? And
when you meet up there do you behave completely differently, and sort of
weirdly?
That’s what thousands of white sharks do every spring, swim
thousands of miles from the California coast to a remote open ocean area, to
spend a couple months hanging out at what Stanford University scientists dub
“the White Shark Café,” half way between San Francisco and Honolulu. (Another scientist quipped a better name – “White
Shark Bistro – beast row.”)
Why do they go there?
The surface waters are barren, much less food than their usual “coastal
cornucopias.” (No seals, sea lions etc., yummy shark food. And white sharks need to eat a lot.) While at the café the sharks, especially the
males, do weird “bounce dives,” fast repetitive dives as deep as 450 meters, down
and up quickly over and over, day and night.
Is there more food deep down, or is it a mating ritual?
How do scientists know about the café and what sharks do
there? Amazing technology, acoustic tags
that help locate them, satellite tags collecting data, drones scouting the
sharks and tags, lab techniques analyzing the chemistry and DNA of the water
and animal residue – all aboard the research vessel Falkor and an amazing
interdisciplinary team of marine scientists.
They’re in the middle of their two-month first ever expedition to the
café – follow it at https://schmidtocean.org/cruise/voyage-white-shark-cafe/
(Yes, Schmidt, like Eric and Wendy, the Google execs providing the ship and
tech support.)
The café is the size of Colorado, part of the 40% of international
waters in the world ocean, “belonging” to no one and everyone, ie needing extra
protection. And you think your café is
special? The shark café is being
proposed as a World Heritage Site; this expedition will give them more info for
the application.
What does this have to do with Blue Theology, our ministry
of ocean stewardship and spirituality? What’s
the White Shark Café’s good news?
-God loves each and every creature and wants every single one
of us to have food and family.
-God gave us brains for a reason and is happy when we use
them.
-Faithful readers will know I love Pope Francis’ insistence,
in his “Laudate Si” encyclical on environmental stewardship, that we must do a
“careful inventory” of all God’s creations in order to protect and preserve
them.
-And don’t you think that God loves to hang out, meeting and
eating with friends, just as much as anyone else, wet or dry?
If you are a pray-er, hold in
your prayers these researchers on this long dangerous trip. And pray for the sharks as well, who are not at
all the mean violent creatures of the movies, just boys and girls looking for
dinner and a date, maybe kids. Bless
them all.
________________
I write about Blue Theology every Wednesday here and at Facebook. Six different groups of youth and
adults are coming to our Blue Theology Mission Station in Pacific Grove this
summer to learn about ocean stewardship and spirituality, with a “spiritual”
tour of the Aquarium, service work on dunes and beaches, whale watching and
kayaking optional. We are proud of our fine church latte machine,
and we surely do a lot of eating and meeting – perhaps we should call ourselves
the Blue Theology Café. www.bluetheology.com
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