June 25, 2014 — Over the weekend, footage surfaced of a peckish great white shark’s close encounter with some friends on a small fishing boat off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey. The video is chilling in an almost Freudian way, dredging up the real life filmic monster that left generations of moviegoers scared shitless at the prospect of swimming in the pool let alone the fucking ocean.
But for some, this rare encounter didn’t come as a surprise. Earlier this month, reports trickled in with news that Julia, a great white shark fitted with an acoustic tag, had arrived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Detected first on June 13th, off of Chatham, Julia is likely the first great white to the cape this year. It’s also likely that she won’t be the last.
In a comforting report published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that great white numbers are surging in the oceans the Eastern US and Canada after decades of decline. This is thanks to conservation efforts, like a 1997 federal act banning the hunting of them. If frolicking with a few more great whites than usual makes you squeamish, you’ll be happy to hear that they aren’t the only species of shark that are plentiful in the chilly waters of the Atlantic these days, either.
But surging numbers beg the question of overpopulation, and, as humans, it is our duty, of course, to regulate ecosystems as we see fit. Sometimes, this means asserting our position in the food chain. Don’t grab your harpoon yet, though; great whites are still out of bounds. But all along the northeastern coast and scattered throughout the country, there is a burgeoning movement promoting the domestic consumption of certain shark species, and it’s growing in popularity.