The tracks from the dozens of white sharks we've tagged off the Farallon Islands show white sharks leaving their feeding grounds in winter on a long sojourn westwards across the Pacific.

Most hang out in the equivalent of a vast desert, an 400 mile-wide area with no distinctive underwater features, such as sea mounts. The aggregation occurs in the vast subtropical gyre, and their chosen area doesn't seem to differ from the ocean surrounding it for many miles. The area doesn't have much of a food base, either -- little plankton to support a food web. Not only do the sharks head to this zone, but once there, they linger for months. The tags show that the sharks will often do yo-yo diving: surfacing, then diving to 700 feet, sometimes as deep as 2000 feet, then surfacing, in 16-minute intervals, sometimes for as long as 18 hours. We're monitoring the movements of tuna and other species to look for overlap to see if that's what might be attracting the sharks. We'd like to put together an expedition to the area to find out what the sharks are doing.

You can see very clearly in the animated map on the white shark species page how the sharks congregate and hang out in that very wide area....much like people do in a cafe, hence, the name.