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Tweets from the Deep.

Our fascination with great white sharks isn’t new, but following one with her very own Twitter account is.

Last year a great white was captured by The Ocearch Project, as part of their groundbreaking program to discover more about the navigational habits of sharks. Nicknamed Lydia, the four-metre long female was hauled out of the water off the coast of Florida where a GPS unit was placed in her dorsal fin.

Since being fitted with the honing device, she’s clocked up more than 19,000 miles, and even made a self portrait with her swimming pattern. But it wasn’t until she started to cross the Atlantic and head straight towards the UK that Lydia started grabbing the headlines.

Being the first tracked great white to venture into the colder waters of the North Atlantic has made Lydia almost as famous as Jaws. And having celebrity status of course means setting up a Twitter account (albeit not necessarily an official one). By her own admission “it’s pretty tricky using Twitter when you don’t have opposable thumbs” but she seems to be doing ok – she’s managed to give her followers updates on her locations and even found time to poke fun at Ryanair’s prices.

Donna Williams
Senior Creative UK

Cover image: Terry Goss [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons