Moo

The crew called him the spotty old male.¹

Moo was tagged in June 2002 — a 4.6-metre male with a chipped dorsal fin and a pigmentation pattern distinctive enough to earn him a nickname instead of just a catalogue number.² He came back in 2004. Then 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Summer 2011.² Up to fifteen consecutive seasons at the Neptune Islands, which was, at the time, a record no other white shark in the database had touched.¹³

He was the proof before Imax was the proof. The first animal to make it undeniable that individual white sharks don't just pass through — that some of them come back to the same place, year after year, with a fidelity that looks a lot like preference.

Imax eventually broke the record.¹³ Moo was last recorded in 2014.³ That's over a decade of silence now. Males skip years — it happens — but twelve years is a long time to be gone.

Dorsal fin missing a portion from the bottom of the trailing edge. Pronounced spotty pigmentation pattern — hence the crew nickname. 4.6m. Straightforward photo-ID match across years.¹²