Saving Seafood

Technology Making Shark Sightings Off Cape Cod Waters More Accurate

July 19, 2022 — With all the shark activity off Cape Cod waters so far this season, its no wonder the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife has added extra technology to make sightings even more accurate.

This past weekend alone, Cape Cod waters had 12 reported shark sightings from Provincetown to Chatham, some as close as 50 yards offshore. The newly updated Sharktivity App has been allowing beachgoers to report their sightings all summer, but new technology in the water is making things even more accurate.

Just recently MassWildife teamed up with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy to install two acoustic receiver buoys off Wellfleet beaches. One floats offshore at  Newcomb Hollow and the other is at Lecount Hollow/Maguire Landing. ⁣⁣Both transmit extremely accurate data right to area beach staff.

Last summer several of these buoys were deployed by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy all across the Cape coastline, but the Wellfleet buoys seem to be new this season.

Perhaps it’s the growing amount of shark activity in the area that made these buoys necessary or the tracking devices already placed in white sharks showing researching this is a popular area. Whatever the reason, the buoys are now active, making Cape Cod beach visits much safer.

No word on where the next buoys might be deployed, but if more sharks swim along the SouthCoast (like last week’s Westport shark visit) perhaps we’ll have buoys in our neck of the woods before the summer is over.

The buoys’ technology is extremely helpful to lifeguards on shore since they can tell you when a tagged shark is swimming off the coast and where it might be headed. Beach staff can then use that date to fly the appropriate shark flag to let beachgoers know what is going on.

Read the full article at WBSM

The surprising reasons we should cheer the return of great white sharks

June 14, 2022 — Nearly every summer for the past two decades, Erin Graeber of Braintree has traveled to Cape Cod with her family, often visiting local beaches for a swim. But in 2018, after 26-year-old Arthur Medici was killed by a great white shark off the coast of Wellfleet, Graeber decided her days of ocean swimming on the Cape were behind her. “The joy I get from being in the water is now overshadowed by the fear,” she says. “It’s not worth it.”

Graeber is not alone. Last summer, a school of striped bass was enough to send me and every other swimmer at a beach near Portland, Maine, scrambling to shore. Admittedly, stripers bear little resemblance to gray seals, the favorite prey of great white sharks (often called “white sharks” by scientists), but after a shark attack in nearby Harpswell killed 63-year-old Julie Dimperio Holowach in 2020, we weren’t taking any chances.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

Great white shark chomps on researcher’s video camera off Cape Cod

The video shows the shark’s teeth and even wrinkles on its tongue.

August 4, 2017 — CHATHAM, Mass. — The top shark scientist in Massachusetts has shot hundreds of great white shark videos, but for the first time one has tried to take a bite of his camera.

Greg Skomal, a researcher with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, was tagging great whites with a crew from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy on Monday off the southern shore of Cape Cod when a shark chomped on his GoPro.

Read the full story from the Associated Press and watch the video at the Portland Press Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: Great White Shark Numbers Increasing On Cape Cod

May 26, 2017 — We’re getting close to that time of year, when the great white sharks make their annual visit to the waters of Cape Cod. Cape Cod is the only known aggregating site for white sharks in the North Atlantic.

According to the latest study by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the number of great white sharks vacationing there appears to be rising. That’s a public safety issue for towns, according to the state’s top shark expert.

Guest

Gregory Skomal, program manager and senior marine fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. His research group tweets @a_whiteshark.

Interview Highlights

On their survey of the numbers of great white sharks

“We are right in the middle of a 5-year population study … what I can tell you … is how many individuals we’ve tabulated year for the last couple of years. In 2016 for example, we identified 147 individual white sharks along the Eastern shoreline of Cape Cod. The year prior to that, it was 141 and the year prior to that in 2014, it was about 80. So we’re seeing that subtle increase from year to year. And as tempted as I am to say that it’s actually an increase in the population size, it’s more likely a shift in the distribution of sharks in response to the growing seal population.”

On how the seals are attracting sharks

“Most people don’t realize the interesting history of the seal populations on the Northeastern coast of the U.S. They had been all but drive to extinction a couple of hundred years ago. And now, with protection that was put in place in the early 1970s, we’ve seen the slow growth in the population that has now resulted in literally tens of thousands of seals along our coastline. And that has drawn the attention of one of their predators, the white shark.”

Read and listen to the full story at WBUR

More great white sharks appear to be visiting off Cape Cod

March 14, 2017 — Great white sharks are discovering what tourists have known for years: Cape Cod is a great place to spend the summer.

The latest data from a multiyear study of the ocean predators found that the number of sharks in waters off the vacation haven appears to be on the rise, said Greg Skomal, a senior scientist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, and the state’s top shark expert.

But that’s no reason to cancel vacation. The sharks are after seals, not humans, and towns are using the information from the study to keep it that way.

“How long does it stay and where does it go are the questions we’re trying to answer,” Skomal said. “But for the towns, it’s a public safety issue.”

Researchers using a plane and boats spotted 147 individual great white sharks last summer. That was up slightly from 2015, but significantly more than the 80 individual sharks spotted in 2014, the first year of the study, funded by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.

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

MASSACHUSETTS: The Sharks are Coming

May 19, 2016 — Get ready – the sharks are coming. And local officials are hard at work tracking them.

“It’s a lot of laborious work, but it really kicks off the season for us,” said Dr. Greg Skomal of the Division of Marine Fisheries.

On Wednesday, Skomal and volunteers were busy preparing receivers that track tagged great white sharks when they arrive in Massachusetts waters.

Read and watch the full story at NECN

Study uses information from shark strikes on underwater drone to understand behavior

January 11, 2016 — In 2012, when state shark scientist Greg Skomal and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution engineers Amy Kukulya and Roger Stokey first envisioned tracking and filming great whites underwater using a self-propelled torpedo, they worried about disturbing the natural movements and activities of these huge predators.

What they didn’t anticipate was that the REMUS, at about 6 feet long and weighing around 80 pounds, would become the prey, surviving nine attacks and four bumps by great whites weighing thousands of pounds during a week of research in 2013 off Guadalupe Island in Mexico.

Video: See up-close shark video from WHOI’s REMUS “SharkCam”

In a world where there is very little documented about the life of great white sharks, you take what you can get. While they weren’t what researchers anticipated, the attacks on the REMUS at around 160 feet below the surface mark the first time such predatory behavior has been filmed deep underwater.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Biology, co-authors Skomal, Kukulya, Stokey and Mexican shark researcher Edgar Mauricio Hoyos-Padilla, described how the hunter got captured by the game, as the torpedo they hoped would document a predatory attack on a seal or other marine animal became an unintended lure that attracted great whites and then recorded the attack in a panoramic view on six high definition underwater cameras.

“I was extremely surprised by it,” Skomal said of the REMUS’ mysterious appeal as a potential meal for so many of these sharks.

Read the full story from the Cape Cod Times

 

Lecturers talk global conservation efforts, decline of fisheries

October 31, 2015 — Artist James Prosek uses fish as inspiration for his work.

Prosek, who has also written 13 books, told stories at a Saturday lecture at SUNY-ESF of when he was 9 years old and trespassing rivers to fish. Though his youth involved catching and releasing 30 fish to take a picture, Prosek said he now prefers to catch one and eat it.

About 100 people attended the most recent installment of the SUNY-ESF Dale L. Travis Public Lecture Series, which focused on the future of fisheries. The lecture, entitled “The Future of Fisheries: Choices, Decisions, and the Role of the Arts,” featured five speakers: Karin Limburg, John Waldman, Prosek, David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes.

During the lecture, Swedish folk music played in the background.

The music tied into Limburg’s discussion about fish hook experiments in Gotland, Sweden. Limburg was the first of five speakers during the lecture, which took place in Marshall Hall on the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry campus.

The talk opened with a traditional  reading and translation by a Haudenosaunee representative. The excerpt concluded with, “Now our minds are one.”

In addition to discussing her fish hook experiments, Limburg spoke in depth about her study of otoliths, which are chronometers in the ear of a fish that show its precise age and chemical makeup.

Read the full story at The Daily Orange

 

Cape Cod’s great white sharks head closer to shore

August 31, 2015 — July and the first week of August are often thought of as the dog days of summer, but if last year and this year are any indication, August and September could become the shark days of summer.

On Monday, researchers encountered 23 great white sharks from Chatham to Orleans, including three off Nauset Beach. The burgeoning population of sharks visiting the Cape has prompted local officials to rethink how they protect the swimming public from a potentially dangerous encounter.

While video footage of each shark seen Monday will still have to be analyzed to make sure they are 23 unique sharks and not repeats, it continues a trend in recent weeks, with 17 new sharks identified in one day three weeks ago and 19 in one day a week and a half ago.

More disturbing to beach managers is a pattern in recent weeks of great white sharks cruising in shallow water at swimming beaches along the coastline of the Outer Cape, prompting the temporary closing of some of the region’s most popular beaches.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

Fourth shark attack in two weeks reported in North Carolina

June 23, 2015 — An eight-year-old boy suffered minor injuries after being bitten by a shark on Wednesday while swimming in knee-deep water in Surf City, North Carolina.

Town manager Larry Bergman says the town does not plan to warn visitors about the shark bite or tell swimmers to get out of the water, but it has increased police beach patrols.

The Surf City incident is the fourth shark bite in shallow water off a North Carolina beach in the past two weeks.

“It really comes down to a joint decision on public safety officials, including myself,” Bergman said. He said he would have decided to close the beaches “if there was a big hazard, if there was an imminent danger”.

The town does not have an official lifeguarding staff, instead employing police officers and water-rescue-trained firefighters to patrol the beaches on four-wheelers. Beachgoers swim “kind of at their own risk”, Bergman said.

Read the full story at The Guardian