When killer whales appeared near white shark aggregation sites in South Africa, Mexico, and California, the sharks left. Sometimes they didn't return for months. The interpretation was causal and clean: killer whales drive white shark absences. Predation pressure reorganizes the local ecosystem.
Twelve years of acoustic telemetry data from a white shark aggregation site tell a different story (2026). Six prolonged absences of 42 or more days occurred during the study period. Only one coincided with killer whale presence. The longest absence happened when no killer whales were detected at all. And not every killer whale encounter produced a long-term departure — a 2024 sighting triggered only a five-day absence before the sharks returned.
The killer whale effect is real but incomplete. Orcas can absolutely trigger immediate departure. What they don't explain is the extended absence that follows, or the extended absences that occur without any orca at all. The sharks' residency patterns have their own variability — long absences are part of the natural cycle of site use, driven by factors the study couldn't fully resolve (prey availability, oceanographic conditions, seasonal migration rhythms).
The general principle: when a dramatic event (predation, disruption, intervention) coincides with a behavioral change, the event captures the explanation entirely. The underlying baseline variability — the fact that the change would sometimes occur without the event — becomes invisible because the event is more narratively satisfying. Twelve years of continuous monitoring revealed that the dramatic explanation accounted for one of six episodes. The other five were the background, promoted to foreground only in the absence of a better story.