'Shark Men' scout out shark nursery

By Chris Ross/Chris Fischer, National Geographic

A great white shark dragging buoys after taking the bait.

EnlargeCloseBy Chris Ross/Chris Fischer, National Geographic

A great white shark dragging buoys after taking the bait.

Don't worry, there's still plenty of snapping jaws and saltwater drama, though. Starting Sunday with a double episode, Shark Men (National Geographic Channel, 9 p.m. ET premiere) returns for its second season of shark wrangling. This year, the team travels from the Guadalupe Island about 150 miles off the Mexican coast, to Malibu, to the Gulf of California in search for the breeding ground of great white sharks cruising California's coast.

"There are some fundamental puzzles of the great white sharks," says expedition leader Chris Fischer of OCEARCH, a nonprofit ocean conservation group based in Washington, D.C. "The really big one is finding out where female ones are going to have their pups."

On board the Ocean, a former crabbing boat turned shark hunter ship, Fischer and his team, which includes shark biologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, Calif., set off in 2009 to solve this mystery. "We had a unique group of people, who you'll see putting their body parts on the line, who really love the ocean."

Despite sharks' movie fame, much of shark biology remains a mystery, even for the renowned great white shark, Carcharodon carcharia. They can grow some 16 to 19 feet long and particularly like to dine on seals (people not so much, although there are attacks occasionally, such as reports of kayakers off the California coast) and bony fish. But knowledge of how they spend their lives, where they breed, where they hunt and how they migrate, roaming warm waters worldwide, is incomplete. Only in 2005, for example, did a study in the journal, Science, led by Ramon Bonfil of the Wildlife Conservation Society, resolve a long-running debate by revealing that female great whites migrate from South Africa to Australia. And on Thursday, a first survey published in the journal Current Biology, of great white sharks off the northern California coast found a surprisingly low number of them, 219 in all.

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