September 8, 2015 — If it seems like there were more sharks than usual near the coast this spring, that’s because there were. A team of federal researchers, part of the longest-running coastal shark research program along the East Coast, captured and tagged more than 2,800 sharks — the most in 29 years of population monitoring before the summer season got underway.

“We caught fish throughout the survey,” said Lisa Natanson, a scientist at the Narragansett Laboratory of NOAA Fisheries’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center and leader of the coastal shark survey. “Sandbar sharks were all along the coast, while most of the dusky sharks were off North Carolina. We captured a bull shark for the first time since 2001 and recaptured 10 sharks previously tagged by our program and two sharks tagged by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.”

No one is sure why the numbers were up. It could have been the fish were simply concentrated in the study area from Florida north to Delaware during the time the sampling occurred. That could have been driven by any number of factors ranging from water temperatures to availability of prey, said Shelley Dawicki, a spokeswoman for the science center.

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