1,200-Pound Great White Shark Tracked In Gulf Off FL Panhandle: Watch

FLORIDA PANHANDLE — Just ahead of spring break, an 11-foot, 7-inch great white shark was tracked to the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida Panhandle.

Maple, a sub-adult female shark weighing 1,264 pounds, pinged about 43 miles southeast of St. George Island on Monday morning, OCEARCH shared in a Facebook post.

OCEARCH is a research group that tags sharks and other sea life with electronic trackers and releases them back into the wild. They follow the animals’ movements throughout North America. (Watch a video the organization shared about Maple below.)

She was initially tagged Sept. 14, 2021, at Ironbound Island, Nova Scotia. She was named after the maple leaf, a national emblem of Canada, the group said.

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At the time she was caught and tagged, she “had a distinctive wound on the left side of her body,” according to the OCEARCH website.

The group said that Maple was likely wounded during an interaction with a larger shark, possibly in a display of dominance that wasn’t intended to be fatal.

Since then, Maple has traveled extensively along the East Coast and 9,666 miles in the past 325 days alone, making her way to Florida waters.

“Over the past two seasons, Maple has spent much of her winter in the Gulf of Mexico,” the group wrote on Facebook.

Watch a video of Maple being tagged and released: