July Bubble Painting

The original painting for the July edition of the Bubble Post. 

This painting is inspired by the Great White Sharks.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

The great white shark is a large apex predator that sits at the top of the food chain and plays an important ecological role in the oceans. Their ancestry dates back more than 400 million years and they are one of evolution's greatest success stories. 

This shark gets its name from its white-colored underside but is dark gray to brown on top. It has a torpedo-shaped body with a conical snout and is the largest shark in the mackerel shark family. Great whites have around 300 teeth in total in up to seven rows. They enjoy a diverse and opportunistic diet of fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals, including seals and dolphins.

Great White Sharks do not have bones. Their skeletons consist of 200-400 structures made of hard cartilage. The only part of a shark’s skeleton not made of cartilage is their teeth, which they’re famous for and found as fossils around the world. These sharks can grow up to about 20 feet long, weighing over 4,000 pounds.

These sharks are powerful swimmers, capable of going 50 kph/35 mph. They are uniquely adapted to their ocean environment with highly refined senses, including electromagnetism. Their most acute sense is smell with an organ called the olfactory bulb, and they are able to identify just a single drop of blood floating in 10 billion drops of water. Great white sharks also have an elaborate sense of touch through what’s called the lateral line that runs from its tail to its head. It is made of cells that can perceive vibrations in the water. These sharks can detect both the direction and amount of movement made by prey, even from as far as 820 ft (250 m) away. They are also known for navigating through the open ocean using the Earth’s electrical currents with a series of pores on the shark’s snout that are filled with cells called the Ampullae of Lorenzini. 

Great white sharks follow viviparous reproduction which means they give birth to live young rather than laying eggs. The embryos develop inside the mother’s body and they are nourished by a yolk sac. As they grow, they receive additional nutrients from the mother through a structure called the placental connection.

These historic sharks are found in almost all temperate and subtropical oceans worldwide. Major populations and feeding hotspots are located off the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Mexico, southern Australia and New Zealand, & South Africa. Their biggest threat to their survival are humans due to accidental fishing, illegal poaching, large nets surrounding beaches and pollution. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

12 in. x 8 in.

Frame not included. 

Only 1 Available.

Painting shipped through USPS.