HalcyonDaze
Contributor
When I was living in Southern California between 2006 and 2009, it seemed that while I never actually saw them alive, I saw far more evidence of white sharks than blues or makos. I saw two mauled sealions, had a researcher from UC Davis drop by to pick up a detached satellite tag that came up off Ship Rock, and got to participate in the necropsies of perhaps half a dozen or more juveniles. By that point white sharks had been protected from hunting for 10-15 years, whereas blues and makos were still open to recreational and commercial take. From what I understand, even the market squid spawning aggregations - which used to attract large numbers of blues off Southern California - aren't yielding many sharks. I think there are still a few tour operators out there trying to get blues and makos, but they certainly don't get the hordes that were the staple of the old documentaries I grew up on in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
One has to wonder what the relationship is between the apex predators in that area. The sealions were almost toast until they were protected in the early 1970s; arguably the white shark population was probably depressed during that time due to the shortage of prey. Now things seem to be flipped - the sealions are at carrying capacity, the white shark population on the Pacific coast is probably up into the low thousands, and the makos and blues seem to be way down.
