Saving Seafood

More than 150 great white shark sightings logged off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, since June

August 5, 2019 — There have been more than 150 great white shark sightings since June off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a popular East Coast vacation spot, according to scientists.

This week alone, more than 20 great white shark sightings logged off the Cape, prompting three days of beach closures in a row beginning Tuesday.

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s sharktivity app indicates that there have been more that 161 shark sightings off the coast of Massachusetts since June 1. The same shark can be spotted multiple times, scientists note.

Read the full story at NBC News

Great white sharks rule Cape Cod waters

August 1, 2019 — Scientists have begun a new research program around Cape Cod in Massachusetts, focusing on movements and behavior of a growing great white shark population, to reduce the increasing potential for interactions with humans.

Atlantic white sharks are the center of attention in the frenetic Cape Cod summer tourism season, as the combined resurgence of their primary food source, gray seals, and the shark population plays out.

The shark season has been early and active, with numerous sightings and several temporary beach closings ordered as a result in July. It’s been just one year since two shark attacks off cape beaches resulted in the first recorded fatal shark attack in Massachusetts since 1936 when a body board rider was killed.

Barnstable County towns have invested in better warning and communication systems, pre-position first aid trauma kits and equipment to be prepared for another attack. One Nantucket-based group even asked local officials to seek federal action for changing the seals’ legal status under the Marine Mammal Protection Act — an echo of demands years ago in New England and Canada for the animals be culled in hunts.

Instead the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the nonprofit Atlantic White Shark Conservancy based at Chatham, Mass. and other partners are in a new push to expand their study of white shark movements and behavior, with an emphasis on improving public safety in nearshore waters and channels where the animals hunt seals.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Meeting scheduled to discuss recent shark sightings off Massachusetts coast

July 18, 2019 — According to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s “Sharktivity” app, dozens of shark sightings have been reported off Cape Cod in the last month.

Greg Skomal, a shark biologist with the Division of Marine Fisheries, tweeted Tuesday that the agency tagged four white sharks, bringing its total to a dozen this season.

‘We haven’t tagged this many this early, so it’s been a banner year,” he said.

While this means it’s potentially easier to track the sharks and know just how many are new to the area or not, it still has beachgoers on edge.

On Wednesday, ATI Systems of Boston and the Wellfleet Concerned Citizens Coalition are presenting to the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners.

The groups have scheduled educational presentations on “Cape Cod seal and shark-related issues.”

Read the full story at WPRI

Shark-infested waters: The ‘new normal’ on Cape Cod

July 3, 2019 — Lifeguards on Tuesday spotted a shark near the shore on Cape Cod and shut down a Wellfleet beach for an hour — the “new normal” for the popular tourist destination, less than a year after the first fatal shark attack there since 1936.

A great white shark lingered 40 yards off Marconi Beach in Wellfleet on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Lifeguards closed the beach for one hour after the sighting — during one of the busiest Cape weeks of the year.

“It’s the new normal now,” said Tom King, a shark expert from Scituate. “For generations, everyone’s gone down to the beach and frolicked around in the salt water, going in and out of the water without any concerns. There were no sharks here.

“Now, we have company,” he added.

On Monday, at least 11 white sharks were spotted by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy research team on Cape Cod Bay. Researcher Greg Skomal tagged two of the sharks — a 9-footer and a 10-footer — the first sharks tagged this year.

Then on Tuesday, the senior biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries tagged a 12 1/2-foot white shark about a mile off Nauset Beach in Orleans.

Read the full story at The Boston Herald

Researchers to Begin New Study on White Shark Behavior

June 6, 2019 — The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries five-year white shark population study is nearing completion and scientists will begin a new wave of research off Cape Cod this summer.

Since 2014, research led by state marine biologist Dr. Greg Skomal has been conducted to get a more accurate picture of how many sharks spend their summers in waters off the Cape.

Results from the five-year study are expected to be released soon.

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, in collaboration with DMF, will start several projects that are focused on getting a better understanding of the predatory behavior of white sharks in the region.

“The big focus now is to get better information to inform public safety practices,” said Megan Winton, a staff scientist with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.

“The best way we can do that at this point is to learn more about what these animals are doing in the waters off of the coast.”

The research conducted over the next five years will be a continuation of the previous population study.

“Now the focus is to really get as many tags on animals as we can to get a better idea of what the population is doing as a whole off of our coast,” Winton said.

Atlantic White Shark Conservancy CEO Cynthia Wigren said it is critical to get a better idea of hunting and feeding behavior from a public safety perspective.

“If sharks are feeding at certain times of the day or stages of the tide, for example, we can use that information to identify periods when the risk of interactions between sharks and recreational water users may be highest,” Wigren said.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

The secret lives of New England sharks

February 28, 2019 — The New Bedford Science Café returns Wednesday March 6 with fisheries biologist Megan Winton, a PhD candidate at the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), UMass-Dartmouth.

His presentation, “You’re gonna need a bigger dataset: How statistics are shedding light on the secret lives of sharks,” is slated for 6 to 8 p.m. at Greasy Luck, 791 Purchase St., New Bedford. Open to everyone. Free, except for beer and food.

Little is known about the great white sharks that swim in these waters. Sharks are notoriously difficult to study in the wild, especially as they migrate vast distances, are elusive and difficult to capture, a press release about the event states. But, as Winton will relate, that’s changing thanks to the rapid development of electronic tags that are capable of recording a tagged shark’s location, movement patterns, and local environment. Scientists now have unprecedented volumes of information to make sense of.

How does the collected data tell scientists what an animal is actually up to? What can be revealed about the broader population? Since 2015, Winton has been working with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy to unravel mysteries about great white sharks off the coast of Cape Cod. As a quantitative fisheries biologist, she employs both math and her knowledge of species biology to gain insights into fish populations. The science, in the long run, can lend to better ways of protecting sharks and improving safety for humans.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Shark conservancy, town team to offer shark bite training

October 12, 2018 — The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy is teaming with a Massachusetts coastal town to provide first aid training for shark attacks.

The “Stop the Bleed” program will begin Oct. 18 and taught for free by Orleans Fire Rescue officials. New England Cable News reports the program is meant to help people in life-threatening emergencies by teaching them the basic techniques of bleeding control.

On Sept. 15, 26-year-old Arthur Medici died after being attacked by a shark at Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet. He was the state’s first fatality from a shark attack in more than 80 years.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Public Meeting Scheduled to Discuss Cape Cod Shark Issues

September 21, 2018 — A community meeting has been scheduled for next week on the Outer Cape to discuss the recent fatal shark attack in Wellfleet.

Officials will also address the larger issue of how to best manage the increasing numbers of great white sharks off local beaches.

Wellfleet Town Administrator Dan Hoort said the meeting will take place at 6 p.m. on September 27 at the Wellfleet Council on Aging.

Hoort said everything will be on the table in terms of discussion points as they want to see what we can do to protect beachgoers.

“We hope to bring in a couple of experts in shark activity to help facilitate the conversation,” Hoort said.

“We want to hear from them and we want to hear from the community.”

Representatives from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and many local lawmakers and town officials are being invited.

Hoort is also hoping Dr. Greg Skomal, the state’s shark expert and senior fisheries scientist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, will be able to attend.

Arthur Medici, of Revere, was fatally wounded by a shark bite on Saturday while boogie boarding at Newcomb Hollow Beach.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

MASSACHUSETTS: Officials to Discuss Shark Safety Following Fatal Attack

September 18, 2018 — The Outer Cape continues to mourn the loss of Arthur Medici after Saturday’s fatal shark attack off Wellfleet and local and Cape Cod National Seashore officials are looking to see what should be done in the future to keep people safe.

They are also looking to see what, if anything, could have been done to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening.

Medici, the 26-year-old from Revere, was attacked by a shark while on a boogie board at Newcomb Hollow Beach around noon on Saturday. He was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital.

The attack was the first fatality by shark in Massachusetts since 1936.

It was the second shark attack on Cape Cod as a man from Scarsdale, New York was bitten off Truro last month. He survived the attack and is recovering from the injuries suffered.

National Seashore Superintendent Brian Carlstrom said they will continue to consult with the White Shark Working Group which is a collaboration between several Cape Cod and Southcoast communities, and shark experts and researchers with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

“Anytime you have an incident like this you want to evaluate how you are doing things and see if there are areas where you can improve,” Carlstrom said. “Maybe some things with communications, maybe some applications with technologies – we are going to have to look at that very closely and see what we might be able to implement.”

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Alec Wilkinson: A Deadly Shark Attack at a Beach on Cape Cod That I Know Well

September 17, 2018 — I grew up spending summers in a house that my parents built for five thousand dollars, in 1952, on a hill above Newcomb Hollow, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a young man died on Saturday from a shark bite. My father used to say that there were no sharks off the Cape, because the water was too cold. He was wrong, of course. The sharks were likely always there, but in deep water, following whales. The whales would occasionally die, for whatever reason, and fishermen would sometimes see sharks feeding on their carcasses. Now, however, the sharks are close to shore, because they prey on seals, which used to be scarce and are not any longer, a result of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed in 1972. The act is typical of our attempts to manage nature. In my childhood, I never saw seals, and it seemed desirable to protect them from being drowned in fishermen’s nets. Now there are so many that one of my nieces described them as an infestation. This summer, I started to think of them as sea rats.

Arthur Medici, the man who died, was twenty-six. He came to America two years ago from Brazil to go to college. In photographs, he is handsome, with dark eyes and a direct gaze. On Saturday, he broke a rule that is risky to break, by swimming at some distance from the crowd. Sharks patrol the shore for seals. They are white sharks, which were once called man-eaters; sometimes they are called “the men in gray suits,” since they are gray with white undersides. They are shaped like torpedoes with fins, a minimalist fish, and there is nothing fancy about their appearance, as if only two colors were necessary for a serious creature. On videos taken from airplanes, you see them moving lazily, unconcerned, since nothing threatens them. The planes tend to be working for Greg Skomal, of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who, with the help of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, has been tagging white sharks for the last few years in order to determine how many visit the Cape—white sharks are not so much migratory as footloose; one of the surprises of tagging them has been learning that instead of following patterns or routes they seem to go wherever the hell they feel like. When Skomal stabs them with a tracking tag on the end of a harpoon, some of them don’t even react, although this summer, one of them leapt up beneath him as if to attack him as he stood on the bow pulpit with his harpoon.

Read the full opinion piece at The New Yorker