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Juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) typically aggregate along coastal beaches; however, high levels of recruitment and shifting oceanographic conditions may be causing habitat use expansions. Telemetry data indicate increased habitat use at the Northern Channel Islands (California, USA) by juvenile white shark that may be in response to increased population density at aggregation locations, or anomalous oceanographic events that impact habitat use or expand available habitat. Findings illustrate the need for long-term movement monitoring and understanding drivers of habitat use shifts and expansion to improve ecosystem management., (© 2023 Fisheries Society of the British Isles. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.)

White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are the largest shark species to display regional endothermy. This capability likely facilitates exploitation of resources beyond thermal tolerance thresholds of potential sympatric competitors as well as sustained elevated swim speeds, but results in increased metabolic costs of adults, which has been documented in different studies. Little, however, is known of the metabolic requirements in free-swimming juveniles of the species, due to their large size at birth and challenges in measuring their oxygen consumption rates in captivity. We used trilateration of positional data from high resolution acoustic-telemetry to derive swim speeds from speed-over-ground calculations for eighteen free-swimming individual juvenile white sharks, and subsequently estimate associated mass-specific oxygen consumption rates as a proxy for field routine metabolic rates. Resulting estimates of mass-specific field routine metabolic rates (368 mg O2 kg-1 h-1 ± 27 mg O2 kg-1 h-1 [mean ± S.D.]) are markedly lower than those reported in sub-adult and adult white sharks by previous studies. We argue that median cruising speeds while aggregating at nearshore nursery habitats (0.6 m s-1 [mean ± S.E = 0.59 ± 0.001], 0.3 TL s-1) are likely a feature of behavioral strategies designed to optimize bioenergetic efficiency, by modulating activity rates in response to environmental temperature profiles to buffer heat loss and maintain homeostasis. Such behavioral strategies more closely resemble those exhibited in ectotherm sharks, than mature conspecifics., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.