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New automated watercraft are helping scientists understand the secret lives of great white sharks, which gather in large numbers each winter in an area nicknamed the “White Shark Cafe.” Although this stretch of ocean between Baja California and Hawaiicontains relatively few food sources, the sharks congregate and display strange behaviors, perhaps related to mating or feeding, one researcher explained to the San Francisco Chronicle . Scientists haven’t had a way to efficiently track and observe sharks in this environment, but new seafaring drone technologies might change that. For example, drones could follow migrations by homing in on acoustic tags on the sharks themselves. Marine biologists at Stanford were recently able to track two great whites on their journeys from California to Hawaii and the White Shark Cafe, as the map shows, but current technology only allows scientists to recreate the sharks’ journeys after monitoring tags pop off and are recovered. The new drones may prove useful not only for tracking sharks and other pelagic fish in real time, but also for collecting important ocean data such as temperature, acidity, and salinity, researchers said.