Great White Sharks Travel

The great Inflatable Toys white shark, immortalized as one of the world's most awesome predators in the movie "Jaws," has long been considered a homebody, hunting in a narrow band of coastal waters and rarely venturing far from shore.

Now, a new study released on Wednesday shows that these massive sharks are actually world travelers, with some swimming thousands of miles into the open ocean on mysterious migrations that broadly expand the powerful carnivores' range across the globe.

"I was shocked by the results," said Burney Le Boeuf, a biologist and one of the authors of the new study published in the current edition of the journal Nature. "Going in to this, what we expected was that white sharks were just coastal animals that breed in Southern California, then migrate a few hundred miles north to feed on seals. But it turns out they've got a life at sea, and when they're in the open ocean, they're diving very deep at times."