The discovery has stunned scientists, who had perviously believed the remote stretch of water, located between Hawaii and Mexico, was an “ocean desert” and had assumed there could be no food to support the diets of the massive yet little-understood predators.
Led by principal scientist Dr Barbara Block of Stanford University and the team aboard the Falkor included marine biologists, engineers and oceanographers from Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford including research scientist Sal Jorgensen.
In preparation for their trip to the cafe, they attached 34 tags on to adult great whites swimming off the coast of California last year.
The sharks then swim for months towards the middle of the Pacific, with the tags programmed to detach themselves and float to the service, at which point the scientists could collect them and recover data which had been beamed up to orbiting satellites.
Over the course of a month, they recovered a total of 10 tags, offering them a treasure trove of data – and a fascinating insight into the what the animals had been up to.
As it turned out, the sharks were feeding in the so-called “red triangle” near Monterey Bay, sometimes diving to depths of 3,000 feet.
Mr Jorgensen said: “The Café is far from the desert it was thought to be.
“It’s home to an abundance of life that satellite imaging is not detecting.
“It only appears to be a desert on the surface because in the Café the base of the food ladder, the plankton that harvest energy from the sun, is concentrated at depths beyond the reach of satellites. In fact, for white sharks, it is more of an oasis.
“It’s been fascinating to learn more about their activities, and through the tagging that the Aquarium sponsored, the white sharks led us to one of the most overlooked and under-studied places in the ocean.”
Mr Jorgensen said within the space of month at the Café, the team had managed to double the amount of tagging data in their collection.
He added: “The trip was hugely successful in that regard.”
“After years of seeing the tagging data, we began to notice incredible diving behaviour and came to realise that they spend most of their life here, in the middle of the ocean and at depths where sunlight ceases to reach, a place called the ‘twilight zone’.
“This trip was about following the sharks out there to see and describe this ecosystem.
“These white sharks are showing us that there is something truly important about the open ocean.
“They’ve heralded the need to ask new and better questions about how apex ocean predators thrive in their underwater world.”
Dr Block added: ”We found a high diversity of deep sea fish and squids (over 100 species), which in combination with observations made by the ROV and DNA sequencing, demonstrate a viable trophic pathway to support large pelagic organisms such as sharks and tunas.”
Great white sharks can be found in the coastal surface waters of all the major oceans.
Females grow larger than males, with larger individuals reaching lengths of up to 20ft, and weighing more than 4,000lb.
They can live as long as 70 years, along the species one of the longest lived of all cartilaginous fish.