June 23, 2014 — The number of great white sharks off the U.S. Atlantic Coast appears to have increased since the early 1990s after conservation measures were introduced to halt their decline, a U.S. government scientist said on Saturday.
Scientists for the National Marine Fisheries Service presented the findings in a study published this month in the PLOS ONE online journal.
Tobey Curtis, one of the government scientists who worked on the study, said in an interview his team could only capture trends in shark abundance and the study could not be used to estimate the total number of sharks in the Atlantic's northwest region, which extends from the U.S. East Coast.
"We don't know what portion of the total population we're documenting," he said.
But Curtis said the findings suggested an "optimistic outlook" for the recovery of the species, which is an apex predator and one of the largest fish in the oceans.
The study's authors described their study as based on the largest white shark dataset yet compiled from the region.