Giant 50-year-old great white shark dubbed 'queen of the ocean' found off coast of Canada
A huge 50-year-old great white shark dubbed the "queen of the ocean" has been caught by researchers off the coast of Canada.
The researchers found the 17 foot, that weighed 1.6 tonnes just off the coast of Nova Soctia.
Scientists from OCEARCH, an NGO that is tagging and sampling white sharks named the female Shark Nukumi.
"We named her 'Nukumi', pronounced noo-goo-mee, for the legendary wise old grandmother figure of the Native American Mi'kmaq people," Ocearch wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
They added: "With the new data we've collected, this matriarch will share her wisdom with us for years to come."
The Mi'kmaq culture has deep roots on the coast of mainland Canada and Nova Scotia, according to the post.
Nukumi is the largest of eight great whites that researchers have sampled during the current expedition, which has been running for 27 days as of Monday.
Chris Fischer, who led the expedition, said: "When you handle an animal of this size it will hit you in a completely different way from an emotional standpoint.”
He described Nukumi as a "proper queen of the ocean, matriarch of the sea, the balance keeper of the future."
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He added it was likely Nukumi was a grandmother. OCEARCH posted a video of Nukumi lying on a special submersible platform built onto the where the researchers were able to access her before she swam away.
OCEARCH is an ocean data-collection organisation that collects data from sharks by launching expeditions and tagging as many as they can find.
They hope to learn more about the migration patterns of the sharks from the information they gather.
Great white sharks are the world's largest predatory fish but are a vulnerable species and their numbers are decreasing.