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10-foot great white shark named 'Crystal' is headed for Florida: Here's how to track it

By FOX 35 News Staff
Updated  November 7, 2023 1:48pm EST
Sharks
FOX 35 Orlando

Massive shark rescued on Florida beach

Beachgoers came to the rescue after a massive shark was stranded on a Florida beach. A woman caught the dramatic scene on video as her husband and some other men worked to bring the shark back into the water.

A massive great white shark is headed toward Florida.

The 10-foot, 460-pound shark named Crystal recently pinged off the east coast of Daytona Beach, Florida, on Nov. 2 at 9:30 p.m., according to OCEARCH, a nonprofit organization that reports research of the ocean's giants to help scientists collect data about the sea.

 A ping happens when an animal tag breaks the surface of the water, sending data. 

The juvenile female shark later Z-pinged – which officials said was a ping with no location data – on Monday at 10:10 a.m. 

Crystal was first tagged by wildlife officials in March 2022 after she was found drifting off of North Carolina. Crystal reportedly circled the OCEARCH team's ship a few times, where they studied her. Officials collected samples for 25 different scene projects including blood and muscle samples, before attaching a tag to her. 

Florida man comes face to face with shark

While surfing at a Volusia County beach, Mark Summerset came face to face with a shark. Literally. The surfer was bit across the face. While he needed over two dozen stitches, he's just happy to be alive to tell the story.

The young shark was named after North Carolina's Crystal Coast, a stretch of beaches located near where she was tagged. She is OCEARCH's only white shark studied during Expedition Carolinas 2022 and the 84th shark sampled and tagged in our Western North Atlantic White Shark Study. 

You can track her location updates, along with other tagged sharks in the water using OCEARCH's shark tracking tool here.