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In late 2003 a young female great white shark slipped away from the coast of South Africa and swam east into open water. A small tag fixed near her dorsal fin quietly recorded the journey. Three months later she surfaced off Western Australia, more than eleven thousand kilometres away. Then she turned around and came home. Scientists named her Nicole. Her crossing, there and back inside nine months, overturned almost everything researchers believed about how far a single shar

For a few weeks each summer, in a patch of blue water off the coast of Mexico, something extraordinary unfolds. Whale sharks arrive in their hundreds. They come for a feast. The sea fills with the tiny eggs of spawning fish, a drifting soup so rich that the largest fish on Earth gather shoulder to shoulder to gulp it down. Seen from the air the scene looks impossible. Dozens of giants cruising side by side at the surface, vast mouths held open, in numbers found almost nowhere

The water at Aliwal Shoal is the colour of strong tea, stirred up by the Indian Ocean swell. A few metres below the surface a ragged tooth shark hangs almost motionless in the current. Its mouth is slightly open. Rows of thin, snagged teeth are on full display. To anyone raised on shark films, it looks like the most dangerous animal imaginable. It is, in fact, doing nothing at all. It has no interest in the divers nearby. It is simply breathing, holding its place in the curre