Saving Seafood

A new trend has surfaced among sharks in Cape Cod waters. Here’s what one expert says

September 26, 2025 — Researchers have been studying white sharks on Cape Cod for nearly two decades, and they’ve been noticing some changing habits over the last couple of years following what seems like an explosion of sightings.

Greg Skomal and his team of researchers at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife are in the thick of white shark research — on the water, studying and tagging several days a week — but they’ve been noticing a trend.

“The number of sharks would increase fairly dramatically through the month of July. And we have noticed that is not happening anymore. Our big months now, it starts in late August, but it’s September, October,” Skomal, of MassWildlife, said. “These animals are migrating past us and getting up to Canada, getting up into the Gulf of Maine a lot faster than they used to.”

Read the full article at NBC Boston

From “Jaws” to Jaw-Dropping Science: How Cape Cod Became a Hotbed for Great White Shark Research

May 23, 2025 — From fear to fascination: That’s how humans’ view of great white sharks has evolved, scientists say, since the movie “Jaws” took the world by storm in 1975.

On Cape Cod, this 50th anniversary summer will be filled with the latest in shark research.

State shark expert Greg Skomal, a senior biologist at the Division of Marine Fisheries, works closely with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy in Chatham. He says technologies like acoustic detection and drone cameras are showing scientists more about shark behavior than ever before.

“What’s really cool is, at the time when ‘Jaws’ was made, we knew virtually nothing about the great white shark,” he said. “And in those 50 years, we’ve totally exploded — meaning the scientific community — what we know about this species. So it’s an exciting time, because the tools that we use now didn’t exist back then.”

One relatively new tool is the video tag. This year, Cape shark researchers plan to put video tags on white sharks to get a “shark’s-eye view” of shark activity inside Cape Cod Bay, rather than off the Outer Cape.

Read the full article at Rhode Island PBS

Plentiful and Ferocious Shark Lurks In Local Waters

January 30, 2024 — The great white shark gets all the coverage, but another shark species, with a far-less cool-sounding name, dominates local waters, at least in sheer numbers.

The Atlantic spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias) is the poor cousin to the more-alluring sharks of greater size and fame. They have sharp, albeit little, teeth, are ferocious predators, and are opportunistic feeders. They like to devour mackerel and herring.

Spiny dogfish can arch their backs and inject venom into predators from their dorsal spines. They are harmless to humans — although a jab from one of their dorsal spines could get infected — but they have been observed biting through fishing nets to get at prey, according to the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

They migrate into local waters in the warmer months, and some remain through the winter. But most stocks are highly migratory, and they spawn in the winter in offshore waters. Spiny dogfish females have between two and 12 eggs per spawning season.

The spiny dogfish is the most abundant shark in the western North Atlantic, but they aren’t the only species of dogfish swimming in local waters. Like the spiny version, the smooth dogfish or dusky smooth-hound (Mustelus canis) can be found in Narragansett Bay. The chain dogfish (Scyliorhinus retifer) can’t. It’s also, confusingly, known as a chain catshark.

Read the full article at ecoRI

Cape Cod is one of the world’s largest white shark hotspots, study finds

July 30, 2023 — A first-of-its-kind study found that Cape Cod is one of the world’s largest hotspots for great white sharks.

The new research from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, UMass Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries determined about 800 white sharks paid a visit to Cape waters between 2015 to 2018. It’s the first time scientists have estimated “white shark abundance” in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to the study.

The numbers from Cape Cod are “comparable to but larger than” previous estimates of white shark populations around South Africa, central California, south Australia and Guadalupe Island in Mexico.

The researchers collected nearly 3,000 videos of shark sightings from 137 trips to Cape beaches.

The shark population peaks on Cape Cod around late summer and into early fall when ocean temperatures are the warmest, findings show.

Read the full article at CBS News

Scientists seeing an increase in shark sightings off the New England coast

July 13, 2021 — While you’re enjoying the beach, something unexpected could be lurking close by.

“Just on the other side of here, I’ve encountered multiple sharks. [You have?] Yep, you know, eight to ten feet of water. [Like while you’re just out working?] Yep, the last one I encountered was in under eight feet of water off the beach just on the other side,” Capt. Kelly Zimmerman of the Got Stryper Fishing Charter tells us.

Kelly has been a captain for the Got Stryper Fishing Charter out of Chatham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod for six years now.

Early on, people who went fishing with Captain Kelly would catch big striped bass. Not so much now.

“The seal population has increased and the more seals that I see, the less of those big bass are sticking around,” Zimmerman explained.

He’s right. The seal population has increased noticeably, thanks in part to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

More seals comes more sharks, most notably great white sharks that average about fifteen feet in length.

Read the full story at WFSB

A year after fatal attack, Maine triples number of shark sensors in coastal waters

July 9, 2021 — Almost a year after a woman was fatally attacked by a great white shark while swimming in a cove in Harpswell, the state is nearly tripling the number of acoustic shark detectors in the waters along Maine’s coast.

Following the fatal July 27, 2020, attack, the state Department of Marine Resources deployed eight acoustic receivers in coastal waters, spread out between Wells and Popham Beach, after it had already placed three in Saco Bay off Old Orchard Beach. The receivers, 11 in total, recorded pings from sharks that had been tagged with transmitters by researchers who are collecting data about the presence of sharks along the coast.

The shark attack last summer, which killed Julie Dimperio Holowach, 63, of New York City, was only the third fatal shark attack in New England since 1936. There have long been seasonal sightings of large sharks on Maine’s coast, though such sightings are considered uncommon. Holowach’s death remains the first known recorded fatal shark attack in Maine.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

A fear of great whites? Shark center aims to show fact vs. fiction

June 11, 2021 — There’s an 18-foot shark hanging in the air, waiting to greet you at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy Shark Center the next time you visit.

“Curly” is a life-sized replica of the largest recorded white shark tagged off Cape Cod. It’s one of many new features added to the Shark Center during a “pretty big renovation” that took place in winter 2020, says center manager Heather Ware.

The center is an arm of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, which has a mission to “support scientific research, improve public safety, and educate the community to inspire white shark conservation.”

But because of COVID-19 concerns, not nearly as many people got to hear that message, or see “Curly” or the rest of the renovation last summer as intended. Typically, the shark center would have had about 17,000 visitors in the summertime. Last year, just over 3,000 came by.

Read the full story at The Providence Journal

International consortium created to study the white shark

December 7, 2020 — Shark research groups and government agencies in the United States and Canada announced Tuesday the establishment of an organization that will unite over a dozen agencies to collaboratively study the white shark.

The New England White Shark Research Consortium joins organizations and universities in Massachusetts—such as the New England Aquarium and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth—with researchers in Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Arizona and Canada.

The group has two primary goals: advance researchers’ current understanding of the white shark, and enhance public education and safety within the region.

Gregory Skomal, the senior fisheries scientist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (which is a consortium member), said the fatal shark attack of a 63-year-old woman off the coast of Maine this summer prompted the creation of the consortium.

“It really pointed to a need for us to coordinate research here in New England,” Skomal said, noting many people were surprised by the location of the attack even though researchers knew white sharks are historically found in Maine waters.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

International consortium to study great white shark behavior in Atlantic Ocean

December 2, 2020 — The great white shark now has an international consortium of governments, universities, and private groups — including authorities from Massachusetts — studying the fearsome predator’s behavior in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.

The sharks have returned to coastal New England and southern Canada in increasing numbers during recent years, sometimes leading to fatal interactions with humans it encounters who are swimming or surfing in the ocean.

Among other completed and forthcoming research the consortium plans to use hundreds of receivers to acoustically track great whites from Rhode Island to Canada in hopes of eventually creating “shark forecast maps” that will alert swimmers when shark activity along beaches is at its most intense, said Megan Winton,chief research scientist for the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy which provides the popular SHARKTIVITY app.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

New regional shark research consortium established

December 2, 2020 — The fatal great white shark attack on swimmer Julie Dimperio Holowach in July in Harpswell, Maine, caught many in the shark research community by surprise.

While it was known that some great whites do travel north into Canadian waters in the summer, there was little in the way of sightings, and just a smattering of attacks on seals.

Holowach was the only confirmed fatality from a shark attack in Maine history, according to Patrick Keliher, state Division of Marine Resources director. Cape Cod, with hundreds of great whites patrolling beaches and daily sightings in the summer months, has had two major attacks on swimmers and a fatal attack on a bodyboarder.

“The incident really did rattle the state of Maine, and justifiably,” said Gregory Skomal, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries shark expert. “A lot of us doing work on white sharks reached out to assist.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times