About

This site introduces some of the individually identified great white sharks of the Neptune Islands, South Australia — animals who return to one rocky archipelago year after year, are known by name to the people who study them, and can now be known by you.

It is not comprehensive — the Fox Shark Research Foundation's database holds more than two thousand identified individuals, and these pages feature fewer than a dozen. The selection is deliberate: these are the animals with the strongest public records, the longest residency histories, or the most distinctive identifying marks. They are a way in, not a way around.

The site exists because the Foundation's work deserves a wider audience. For more than twenty years, Andrew Fox, Rachel Robbins, and their colleagues have been photographing, identifying, and cataloguing individual white sharks at the Neptune Islands — building a dataset that underpins peer-reviewed research on residency, behaviour, and population structure. That work is painstaking, largely unglamorous, and chronically underfunded. It is also the reason any of these sharks can be known by name.

I built this site to make that work more visible. Not to replicate the Foundation's database, or to claim authority over their data, but to do what a small, carefully made website can do: introduce people to specific animals, and through those animals, to the research programme that makes individual knowing possible. If this site sends a single visitor to the Foundation's donation page who would not otherwise have found it, it has done its job.

The Fox Shark Research Foundation is the source and the authority. This site is an introduction. For definitive data, current research, and the full scope of the Foundation's work, go to them directly.

This is a project by Ben McCarthy — a writer and software builder based in Sydney. You can find more of what I do at benmccarthy.com.au, and the YouTube channel where the writing here continues is here.

To support the Fox Shark Research Foundation's research at the Neptune Islands, visit their donation page.