Do Great White Sharks Prefer Warm or Cold Water?

Great white sharks are temperate-water animals, not tropical or polar ones. Most individuals spend the bulk of their time in water between roughly 16°C and 24°C (about 61–75°F), with a peak around 21°C. But that tidy range undersells how flexible they actually are: thanks to a rare biological heating system shared by only a handful of shark species, great whites can hunt in near-freezing deep water one hour and cruise warm shallows the next. The real story is less about preference and more about an animal built to exploit a remarkably wide thermal world.

Where the Comfort Zone Actually Falls

Tracking studies and habitat modeling have converged on a consistent picture. Off southeastern Australia, about 90% of immature white sharks were found in waters between 16°C and 24°C, with suitability peaking at around 21°C.¹ In the North Pacific, juvenile white sharks occupy a preferred band of 16–20°C, even though they encounter water as cold as 6°C and as warm as 26°C throughout the water column.² In South Africa’s Western Cape, the probability of spotting a white shark at popular beaches climbs steeply once surface temperatures pass 14°C and levels off at about 18°C, with sightings roughly five to eight times more likely at 18°C than at 14°C.³

So the broad answer is that white sharks gravitate toward the cool end of what most people would consider comfortable swimming water, roughly the mid-teens to low twenties Celsius. They are not cold-water specialists the way Greenland sharks are, and they are not warm-water animals the way bull sharks or tiger sharks are. They sit squarely in the temperate middle, favoring coastlines in places like California, South Africa, southern Australia, and central Japan.

The Built-In Heating System That Changes Everything

Most fish are ectotherms: their body temperature matches the surrounding water. White sharks are different. They belong to a small group of lamnid sharks that possess vascular counter-current heat exchangers, bundles of tightly packed arteries and veins called retia mirabilia (Latin for “wonderful nets”). These structures sit in the muscles, the brain region, and the gut, and they work by running warm blood leaving a tissue right next to cold blood arriving from the gills. Heat transfers from the outgoing blood to the incoming blood before it can escape to the ocean.⁴

The result is a shark whose core body temperature can ride several degrees above the surrounding water. In the muscles, that warmth translates to faster contraction and greater sustained swimming power. In the brain and eyes, it means sharper sensory processing in cold, dark water. And in the stomach, the effect is dramatic: one analysis found that the liver, which is rich in insulating lipids, helps keep the stomach as much as 17°C warmer than the ambient sea, speeding digestion far beyond what a cold gut could manage.⁵ Faster digestion means the shark extracts energy from a seal meal more quickly, which matters when prey encounters in the open ocean can be unpredictable.

This partial endothermy is the reason the “warm or cold” question does not have a simple answer. A white shark is not stuck tolerating whatever temperature it swims through. It actively manages its internal heat budget, which opens up habitats that would be off-limits to a purely cold-blooded predator of the same size.

How Temperature Triggers Migration

While white sharks can handle a wide thermal range, they do have limits, and they respond decisively when conditions cross certain thresholds. Researchers tagging juvenile white sharks at an aggregation site near Padaro Beach in southern California documented a striking example. In November, a strong upwelling event dropped coastal water temperatures by about 4.4°C over four days. Within five days of the temperature plunge, 87% of the tagged sharks left the area. Some moved to nearby waters within 35 kilometers, but others scattered dramatically: four headed north past San Luis Obispo County, more than 210 kilometers away, and two traveled into Baja Mexico waters, over 1,000 kilometers south.⁶

That kind of rapid, coordinated departure suggests juvenile white sharks are not casually drifting with conditions. They are monitoring water temperature closely and abandoning a site once it falls below some threshold. For young sharks, which have less body mass and therefore less thermal inertia than adults, staying in suddenly cold water likely becomes energetically expensive. Their heating system works, but it costs calories, and at some point the math stops favoring a location.

On the flip side, warmer conditions attract more sharks. In Gansbaai, South Africa, a long-running cage-diving dataset showed that the number of white sharks per trip was higher when sea surface temperatures were warmer, even after accounting for seasonal patterns and broader climate cycles. Warmer-water years also brought more sightings overall.⁷

Deep Dives into Near-Freezing Water

The preferred surface-temperature range only tells part of the story. White sharks are not surface-dwelling animals. When they leave coastal seal colonies and move into the open ocean, they regularly dive to considerable depths. In the eastern Pacific, satellite-tagged sharks making transoceanic journeys between California and Hawaii were recorded making occasional plunges to nearly 1,000 meters, where water temperatures dropped to 3.9°C and dissolved oxygen fell to extremely low levels.⁸

These deep dives are infrequent and brief compared to the time spent in warmer layers, but they demonstrate something important: the “preferred” temperature band reflects where sharks spend most of their time by choice, not the limit of what they can physically endure. A white shark cruising at 18°C for hours and then plunging into 4°C water for a few minutes is exploiting its heat-retention physiology to access prey or navigate in ways that a strictly ectothermic fish of the same size could not manage. The retia in the muscles and brain keep those critical systems warm enough to function even during short exposures to extreme cold.

Is It the Water Temperature, or the Food?

Here is where the question gets genuinely complicated. Researchers consistently find more white sharks in warmer water, but that does not necessarily mean the sharks are seeking warmth for its own sake. The Cape Town bathing-beach study that found dramatically higher sighting rates above 18°C also considered an alternative explanation: since white sharks can regulate their internal temperature and tolerate a wide range of conditions, the warmer-water correlation may really reflect prey availability. Warmer coastal waters tend to hold more fish, and the seals and other marine mammals that white sharks eat follow those fish.³

Work on white shark predation patterns at Seal Island in False Bay reinforced this view, concluding that the relationship between ambient conditions and hunting behavior involves a complex interplay of physical oceanography, biology, and ecology rather than a straightforward thermostat response.⁹ In other words, temperature acts more like a signal that correlates with good foraging conditions than like a direct comfort dial for an animal that can warm its own body. The shark is not cold in 14°C water; it just has less reason to be there if the seals have moved somewhere warmer.

This distinction matters for understanding where white sharks show up and when. Coastal sightings spike in warmer months not simply because the sharks follow a thermostat but because the entire coastal food web ramps up with rising temperatures. Baitfish come inshore, seal pups enter the water for the first time, and the whole ecosystem becomes richer. The shark follows the food, and the food follows the warmth.

How Ocean Warming Is Reshaping White Shark Ranges

If white sharks track a preferred thermal envelope, and that envelope shifts as the ocean warms, then the sharks should shift with it. That is exactly what researchers are observing. In the North Pacific, analysis of juvenile white shark habitat found that warming has produced a poleward expansion and spatial contraction of suitable thermal habitat, meaning the zone of tolerable water temperatures is sliding northward and, in some cases, getting narrower overall.²

Off southeastern Australia, the pattern is more nuanced but points in the same direction. Models project that suitable thermal habitat for white sharks will shift poleward during the cooler months and, counterintuitively, retreat equatorward in summer and autumn as nearshore waters in some regions overshoot the sharks’ upper temperature tolerance. By 2080, some equatorial bioregions could become unsuitable year-round, while certain poleward regions may see suitability increase by 27–38% in autumn, winter, and spring.¹ One specific region, the Twofold Shelf on Australia’s southeast coast, is projected to warm to the upper limit of white shark thermal preference (around 23°C in summer) by approximately 2070, at which point habitat suitability there would start declining rather than improving.

In California, telemetry data have shown juvenile white sharks increasingly using the Northern Channel Islands, an area not historically considered a primary aggregation site. Researchers suggest this may be driven by a combination of rising population density at traditional nursery areas and anomalous oceanographic events that expand the band of suitable habitat northward and offshore.¹⁰

The takeaway is that warming does not simply benefit white sharks by giving them more warm water. It benefits them in some regions and seasons while squeezing them out of others. An animal tuned to 16–24°C surface water has a ceiling as well as a floor, and some parts of their current range are approaching that ceiling.

Why Juveniles and Adults Play by Different Rules

Age and size shape thermal behavior in white sharks. Juveniles, which are smaller and have a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio, lose heat faster. They tend to stay in shallower, warmer nearshore waters, often congregating at nursery beaches where temperatures sit comfortably in their preferred 16–20°C range.² These aggregation sites, like the beaches of southern California or portions of southeastern Australia, function as thermal refugia where young sharks can grow without spending excessive energy on heat retention.

Adults, by contrast, are far more thermally independent. A four-meter adult white shark carries enough muscle mass, insulating tissue, and metabolic output to maintain elevated body temperatures even in much colder water. This is what allows mature sharks to undertake the long offshore migrations between coastal foraging grounds and mid-ocean areas, repeatedly diving through the thermocline into water that would be physiologically challenging for a juvenile. The offshore foraging area in the eastern Pacific, sometimes called the “White Shark Café,” sits in open ocean far from any warm coastline, and adults spend weeks there in water that is warm at the surface but plunges to near-freezing within a few hundred meters.⁸

This life-stage split means that a question like “what temperature do great whites prefer” has a meaningfully different answer depending on whether you are asking about a two-meter juvenile hugging the California coast or a five-meter adult making round trips across the Pacific. The juvenile needs warmth more than the adult does, and its movements are more tightly governed by surface temperature. The adult treats temperature as one variable among many, overriding it when prey, mating, or navigation demands.

What Warmer Nearshore Water Means for Human Encounters

The practical upshot of all this for beachgoers is straightforward but worth stating clearly. Because white shark sightings correlate strongly with warmer coastal water temperatures, regions experiencing marine heatwaves or long-term warming trends can expect to see more sharks in their nearshore waters during warm spells. The Cape Town data showed the probability of encountering a white shark near bathing beaches was several times higher at 18°C than at 14°C.³ That does not mean warm water causes shark attacks; it means the conditions that bring sharks close to shore (warmer water, more prey, better foraging) are the same conditions that bring people to the beach.

As climate change pushes the white shark thermal envelope poleward, communities that historically had little contact with white sharks may see them more often. Parts of northern California, Oregon, the British Isles, and southern New Zealand are all areas where warming could bring conditions within the white shark comfort range more frequently. Meanwhile, some subtropical regions that currently see white sharks seasonally could find visits becoming shorter or less common as local waters overshoot the upper end of the preferred band. For coastal managers trying to minimize risk, surface water temperature is turning out to be one of the more reliable environmental predictors of when sharks are likely to be nearby, a fact that is already being incorporated into real-time beach monitoring systems in Australia and South Africa.

Endothermy as an Evolutionary Wager

The white shark’s thermal biology looks like a successful evolutionary bet. Running an internal heating system is expensive: it demands a high metabolic rate and a constant supply of calorie-rich food. A white shark burns more energy at rest than a comparably sized ectothermic shark would. But the payoff is access to an enormous range of habitats. A white shark can hunt seals in chilly upwelling zones off Cape Town, cross tropical waters on a transoceanic migration, and dive a kilometer deep after squid, all in the same year. Few other large marine predators can match that thermal versatility.

The liver’s contribution to this system is one of the more surprising recent findings. Beyond its role in buoyancy and energy storage, the white shark liver appears to function as a heat reservoir, its high lipid content insulating the digestive organs and helping the stomach stay warm enough to break down large, fatty prey quickly.⁵ A white shark that eats a 50-kilogram seal needs to digest it fast enough to be ready for the next opportunity. A warm stomach makes that possible in days rather than weeks, which may be one of the reasons white sharks can sustain their energy-hungry physiology on the sporadic, feast-or-famine diet that comes with being an apex predator in the open ocean.

Other lamnid sharks like makos and porbeagles share the same basic heat-exchange anatomy, but white sharks have pushed the strategy furthest in terms of body size and habitat range. Whether this system will continue to serve them as ocean temperatures shift is an open question. Their flexibility has always been their edge. The coming decades will test how far that edge extends.