Researchers are shocked to find 2 great white sharks have become 'buddies' since the predators are typically solitary creatures

• Researchers said they were shocked to find out that two great white sharks had become friends.
• The sharks, Simon and Jekyll, have traveled more than 4,000 miles together up the Atlantic Coast.

Turns out that even chronically single apex predators may need companionship sometimes.

Researchers were shocked to discover that two great white sharks — typically solitary creatures — had seemingly become friends and had traveled thousands of miles together.

Scientists at Ocearch, a nonprofit research organization, first tagged Simon and Jekyll with location trackers in December off the coast of Georgia, according to the group's website.

Ocearch said in a video posted on Facebook that scientists had since learned that the sharks had traveled practically side-by-side for more than 4,000 miles up the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

Great white sharks travel hundreds of miles north from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas in the summer to search for gray seals. Canda's rebounding seal population attracts the predators, Live Science reported.

Why are these two great white sharks sticking together?

"This is potentially groundbreaking," Bob Hueter, the chief scientist at Ocearch, said in the Facebook video, adding, "We've never seen anything quite like this before."

Heuter continued, "White sharks lead a very solitary existence. We don't really expect to see these white sharks staying together, but Simon and Jekyll, they seem to be buddies in the sense that they're going in the same place at the same time."

Heuter said in the video that Ocearch was planning to conduct genetic analyses on samples of the sharks' DNA to determine whether the pair were brothers or half-brothers.

They're both juvenile sharks, with Simon weighing in at 434 pounds and 9 feet 6 inches long and Jekyll at 395 pounds and 8 feet 8 inches, according to their profiles on Ocearch's website.

Gray reef sharks, sand tigers, and hammerheads form social groups to some degree. Yannis Papastamatiou, a professor at Florida International University, said behavior varied from shark to shark even though great white sharks were usually solitary. Some are friendly, and others prefer to be alone.