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Right when we were planning to unplug, spread out a towel and spend this summer beachside, reports are showing some unusual activity off the Atlantic. And this great white activity comes with its own iconic theme song.
We're calling it: it's the summer of sharks.
In Cape Cod and its islands, shark numbers are already up, and people are scanning the water for that distinctive fin, according to NBC News Boston. Usually, these toothy fish are not seen in the area until mid-June, but already about a dozen have been spied—the first one on May 29. That sighting involved a great white shark seen near the Great Point Lighthouse on Nantucket. The shark was filmed devouring a seal in a harrowing video posted in a tweet by Nantucket Current.
There was an unconfirmed sighting even earlier at Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro on May 23 that was reported to the Sharktivity app. What’s this, you say? Yes, there is a shark-tracking app, created by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, that lets you share white shark sightings and upload videos to alert others of possible blood-in-the-water scenarios. The icons in the app are adorable – little white dorsal fins on a blue background – despite the grisly possibilities they represent.
The app is both crowdsourced, with regular people able to post sightings that will be verified by the New England Aquarium, and supplied with official posts. Those official posts include data from sharks’ acoustic tags and Smart Position and Temperature transmitting tags that can be affixed to sharks’ dorsal fins. When sharks come to the surface, the tags transmit radio waves to satellites orbiting Earth more than 600 miles away.
Other sightings through the app include a June 1 sighting of four great whites off Nantucket, including one behemoth that was ‘easily 15 feet plus’ with a large piece of its tail missing. That same day, another report identified three great whites off Tuckernuck Island feeding on a dead whale. On June 5, a shark was spied eating a seal off Nantucket with the description ‘eruption,’ and off Chatham Beach someone uploaded a photo of a pool of blood with a dorsal fin in the center. People have also reported several seal carcasses washing up on beaches that appear to have been savaged by sharks.
But it’s not just this particular shore experiencing sharks early this summer. In a super, super early instance on April 28, a 998-pound great white was swimming off the coast of the Jersey Shore, according to his Osearch tracking website and reported by Discovery. He’s a 12-foot long, 20 year old shark named Ironbound. He later ‘pinged’ the site in the Atlantic due east of Philadelphia.
Ironbound continues making tracks. Osearch found him on May 9 swimming just off North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound, as reported by MarketWatch. He goes back and forth from the Florida Keys to Nova Scotia on his typical migration rounds. You can track him yourself here. His latest ping was May 25 at Brown’s Bank, off the coast of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
On May 30, a commercial fisherman spied a 10-foot Mako Shark thrashing around on a Long Island beach until it was able to swim away, also reported by Discovery.
On June 4, off the Jersey shore, a fisherman nearly ran over a 10-13-foot long shark with his 23-foot boat, as reported by New York Post.
And as far back as December 2021, Osearch tracked 100 sharks amassing off the East Coast, also according to the New York Post. Experts said it wasn’t uncommon—and Dr. Christopher Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, said climate change is probably to blame for the change in the sharks’ schedule.
So how do you keep safe? Don’t go into water over your waist, since white sharks tend to hang out in water under 15 feet deep. Watch out for purple flags placed by lifeguard which warn of shark sightings. And keep a sense of fascination rather than terror: sharks rarely attack. The NBC News post says the 2020 deadly shark attack in Maine was the state’s first, and the 2018 fatal shark attack in Cape Code was the first fatal one in Massachusetts in more than 80 years. The 1975 Jaws movie and its sequels, still memorialized at Universal Studios, has created an undue fear in us, because we are betting that as you read this article, you heard the distinctive two-note' duunnn dunnn' theme in your head.
However, we do have to note that the Sharktivity app’s terms of service state in all caps that ‘The only way to avoid sharks is to stay on shore.’