Sex-specific and individual preferences for hunting strategies in white sharks

Fine-scale predator movements may be driven by many factors including sex, habitat, and distribution of resources. There may also be individual preferences for certain movement strategies within a population which can be hard to quantify. Within top predators, movements are also going to be directly related to the mode of hunting; for example sit-and-wait or actively searching for prey. Although there is mounting evidence that different hunting modes can cause opposing trophic cascades, there has been little focus on the modes used by top predators, especially those in the marine environment. Adult white sharks (Carcharhodon carcharias) are well known to forage on marine mammal prey, particularly pinnipeds. Sharks primarily ambush pinnipeds on the surface but there has been less focus on the strategies they use to encounter prey. We applied mixed hidden Markov models to acoustic tracking data of white sharks in a coastal aggregation area in order to quantify changing movement states (Ar...