While the new juvenile white shark swims liesurely in the Monterey Bay Aquarium's massive Outer Bay tank, you can watch his cousin of about the same age trolling up and down the warm waters of Southern California by going to TOPP's data server and clicking on "white shark" in the left navigation. A shark-tagging team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium put two tags on the young shark on July 17. One was a pop-up tag (PAT), which will release from the shark 180 days from July 17. The other is a SPOT tag -- satellite position only -- that sends its location information to the Argos satellite every time the shark surfaces.

The PAT tag is recording what the baby shark is doing -- the depth of its dives, how long it's staying under water before surfacing and the temperature of the water it's in. The PAT's location information is approximate; the SPOT tag is much more accurate. So, with the information from both tags, researchers get a much clearer picture of what juvenile sharks do and where they go.

These images show where the shark is today. The first one, above, locates the shark off the southern California coast. The second marries its track with information from a satellite that measures the surface temperature of the ocean -- red, orange and yellow are warmer, while blues and greens are cooler. The third image is the track married with the satellite that detects chlorophyll in the water -- the green color that indicates plant life, and the base of the ocean food Web.

Stay tuned for more information about this shark. Let's hope he's not caught so that we can watch where he goes for the next several months. We need the information so that we can have a better idea of how to make sure we protect white shark populations for generations to come.