INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — A 14-foot, Great White Shark made a short appearance off the coast of Vero Beach on Monday in her travels from the Northern Coast of Georgia to South Florida.
The young, 2300-pound shark is dubbed “Katharine” after Cape Cod native, Katharine Lee Bates, the author who penned the poem and song “America the Beautiful” in 1893, and has been spotted several times off the coast of Florida over the last month.
Katharine was first tagged in Cape Cod on Aug. 19, 2013, by OCEARCH, a non-profit research organization dedicated to studying “previously unattainable data on the movement, biology and health of sharks to protect their future while enhancing public safety and education.
Katharine has traveled more than 100 miles in the last 24 hours, and approximately 160 miles in the last 72 hours, according to OCEARCH tracking. She continues to travel South and is expected to be tracked somewhere near West Palm Beach very soon.
Katharine first appeared in the Twittersphere in January when one of her fans decided to give her a voice.
“Hey. If I can have a GPS, I can have a Twitter,” the user tweeted on Jan. 11. Since, the faux shark has racked up almost 1000 followers and frequently cracks jokes about how misunderstood she is by the general public.
The shark’s Tweeting is all in good fun and provides education and insight into Katharine and other Great Whites that OCEARCH is so dedicated to protecting.
Anyone interested in keeping up with Katharine’s travels can follow her at http://www.ocearch.org/#SharkTracker or on Twitter @Shark_Katharine.
