Taxonomy

Rarity

Abundance rates how many are in suitable habitat. Find difficulty rates how hard it is to locate one on a daylight snorkel or freedive through 50 ft. A higher find score means a harder search. The rarity category also reflects the kind of encounter; it is not an average of the 2 scores.

Seasonality

Location

Shortfin makos live in temperate and tropical seas worldwide. In the eastern Pacific they range from south of the Aleutian Islands and from southern California down to Chile, which puts the northern edge of their main Pacific range at roughly the top of this site's coverage. They need warm water, 61 degrees Fahrenheit and up, which is why southern California sees them in the warm half of the year.

This is an open-ocean animal. Makos usually hold between the surface and about 490 feet and have been recorded to roughly 2,910 feet, but they spend most of their time near the top. They do come close inshore at times, particularly where deep water runs near the beach, which in southern California means the canyon edges.

They eat bony fishes and other sharks, along with squid and octopus, and large individuals take billfish and small dolphins and porpoises. An isotope study off eastern Australia found the shortfin mako sitting at the very top of the open-ocean fish food web, above everything else measured. There is no meaningful list of animals that eat an adult mako.

Deep Dive

Almost everything remarkable about the shortfin mako comes from one fact: it is a warm-blooded shark built to run down the fastest fish in the ocean.

Makos belong to the mackerel shark family, the same family as the white shark, and members of that group hold parts of their body warmer than the water around them. The mechanism is a dense mesh of blood vessels that runs the outgoing warm blood alongside the incoming cold blood and passes the heat across, so the warmth generated by swimming muscle stays in the muscle instead of being lost through the gills. The same arrangement serves the brain, the eyes and the gut. Tagged makos have been measured carrying muscle 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit above the surrounding water, and 2 individuals that dived deep warmed back up 14 to 47 times faster than they cooled down. A warm muscle contracts faster than a cold one, and in an animal that hunts tuna, billfish and other sharks in open water that difference is the whole hunting strategy. It is why the mako is the shark described as probably the fastest of them all, and why a hooked one comes out of the water rather than sounding.

The body follows the same logic. A mako is a pointed cylinder with large black eyes, a sharp snout, a crescent tail with a strongly developed lower lobe, and tiny second dorsal and anal fins that create almost no drag. The teeth are the tell. A white shark carries large triangular teeth with saw edges. A mako carries long, narrow, hooked teeth with smooth edges. One shape cuts and one shape grips, which is a reasonable way to tell apart a shark that eats seals from a shark that eats fast fish, though the 2 descriptions here are the shapes on record rather than a tested claim about function.

Reproduction is the opposite of fast, and it is why this species cannot absorb pressure. Makos are ovoviviparous, meaning the eggs hatch inside the mother and the pups are born live. What the embryos eat while they are in there is more eggs, produced by the mother for that purpose, a strategy called oophagy. Gestation runs 15 to 18 months. A female then rests, and breeds again only every 3 years. She matures at around 9 feet, which takes years to reach. Litters run 4 to 25 pups, usually 10 to 18, each about 2 feet long at birth. Set that against a maximum lifespan of 32 years and the arithmetic is unforgiving: a female mako produces a handful of litters in her life, and any fishery that removes mature females faster than they can be replaced empties the population from the top.

There are 2 further findings that make the species harder to manage than its numbers suggest. Mako populations are strongly segregated by sex, so a fishery operating in one area may be killing overwhelmingly males or overwhelmingly females rather than a representative sample. And genetic work across global populations suggests males disperse widely while females return to the area they were born in. A population of females tied to a home region is a population that, once removed from that region, does not get replaced by immigration from elsewhere.

Where to Find Them

Researched habitat and range candidates

These locations have suitable habitat within the species range. An assignment is a possible encounter, not a confirmed sighting at every beach. Season, depth, and local conditions still matter. Historical habitat without present-day evidence is excluded.