Greg Skomal Archives - Page 2 of 2

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

Study tracks great white sharks off Maine coast

A UNE professor joins Massachusetts researchers in examining patterns of a population likely to proliferate in the Gulf of Maine.

July 31, 2017 — Marine biologists are embarking on the first study dedicated to learning about the habits of great white sharks off the coast of southern Maine, where the scientists say the fishes’ population is likely to increase.

University of New England professor James Sulikowski will collaborate with Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries to see how often the sharks come near the coast.

Great white sharks are the world’s largest predatory fish. Known for their powerful jaws and serrated teeth, they can grow to more than 20 feet and 4,000 pounds.

They have been protected from harvesting in U.S. waters since 1991. Skomal said the shark population has been rebounding since.

“We definitely believe the entire East Coast population is increasing and that we are likely to see white sharks in the Gulf of Maine increasing,” he said.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

A growing concern over great white sharks in Cape Cod

June 29, 2017 — An influx of great white shark sightings has residents and tourists worried about potential encounters in the water, especially during the heart of summer.

Senior Fisheries Biologist Dr. Greg Skomal told ABC News the increase in the great white shark population off the Massachusetts coastline is correlated to the gray seal population and that numbers are expected to rise even further.

“We’ve been studying sharks off the coast of Massachusetts for 30 years and our work with white sharks off Cape Cod is relatively recent,” Dr. Skomal said on “Good Morning America.” “The numbers we’re seeing on a relative scale are increasing, in 2014 we counted 80 individuals over the course of the summer and just last summer that went up to about 147. So there is a general increasing trend as more and more sharks recruit to the area.”

This season at least six great white shark sightings have already been reported, including a recent sighting off Wellfleet on May 9.

The National Park Service for Cape Cod has issued alerts to heed advisories at beaches to help ensure safety “particularly regarding white sharks.”

Skomal believes the influx of sharks is a direct result of the growing seal population. “We think it’s highly correlated with the growing presence of gray seals in the area. Big white sharks like to feed on gray seals. Over the course of the last 45 years, the gray seal population is a conservation success story. It has rebounded after protection was put in place in 1972 and that rebounding population now has reached levels that could be an excess of 20 to 30,000 animals in the area and white sharks are drawn to those areas to feed on them.”

Read the full story at WJBF

MASSACHUSETTS: Shark Expert Named Guest Conductor for 32nd Annual Citizens Bank Pops by the Sea

June 28, 2017 — Dr. Greg Skomal with the state Division of Marine Fisheries will be the guest conductor of this year’s Citizens Bank Pops by the Seas concert.

The 32^nd annual event will be held on August 13 on the Hyannis Village Green.

Skomal will join Keith Lockhart and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a show that celebrates the Cape and the music of film composer John Williams.

Coinciding with Williams’ 85^th birthday, the concert will perform scores from “Harry Potter”, “Star Wars” and “Jaws”.

“We started thinking about how we could build upon this awesome music and the history and we were thinking about Cape Cod and then we were thinking about jaws, and sharks and Greg Skomal came to mind,” said Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Executive Director Julie Wake.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

100-shark milestone surprises even researchers

October 11th, 2016 — With a quick jab, Greg Skomal reached a milestone last week. The detachable stainless steel tip on his harpoon penetrated the skin of a 14-foot male great white shark hunting seals just 20 feet off Nauset Beach. The dart lodged between the tendons at the base of the shark’s dorsal fin, tethered to a pencil-size acoustic tag that will broadcast a signal identifying the shark for the next decade.

Skomal had tagged his 100th great white, dating back to 2009 when the massive predators began showing up in appreciable numbers off Chatham. He named the shark Casey after shark tagging pioneer Jack Casey, who founded the National Marine Fisheries Service Cooperative Shark Tagging Program in 1962 and developed many of the techniques still in use today.

As the number of sharks coming to the Cape seems to grow every year, so has Skomal’s appreciation of the unique situation he finds himself in: a shark researcher caught in a real-life “Sharknado.”

“If you told me 10 years ago we’d hit a hundred, I’d say, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said.

The number of sharks ranging along the Cape’s shoreline, many passing near surfers and swimmers, is sobering. Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, is finishing the third year of a five-year population study and has identified more than 200 individual sharks through tagging and underwater videos that find unique scars and coloration on each animal.

“Frankly, I was surprised nobody got bit this summer,” said Chris Lowe, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, noting that seals and sharks have modified their behavior to the point where the sharks must hunt in increasingly shallow waters, including the popular beaches where millions swim every summer.

A soon-to-be published study of seven adult gray seals, captured and tagged on the Cape three years ago by a team led by Duke University professor David Johnston, showed them leaving the shore to feed at all times of day and night, and taking multiday trips, when sharks are not around in the winter. But the summer is a different story. Johnston said the study found seals have adapted their behavior to better avoid white sharks. Since great whites rely heavily on their eyesight to hunt, tagged seals were leaving at twilight and taking only single day trips in summer, he said.

Read the full story at The Cape Cod Times

Researchers feud over shark studies off Cape Cod

October 5th, 2016 — A battle is brewing on the high seas off Cape Cod between two groups of researchers trying to tag and track the growing population of great white sharks.

In September, OCEARCH, a non-profit that travels the globe studying marine animals, launched a short-term project called Expedition Nantucket in federal waters, between Cape Cod and the island of Nantucket.

But biologists from the state Division of Marine Fisheries, who are in the third year of a five-year study of the oceangoing predators, say OCEARCH’s vessel has come close to state waters, where they are conducting their own research. The state experts fear that OCEARCH’s methods of attracting and capturing sharks could alter the animals’ natural behavior, jeopardizing their work.

“We’re scared to death of introducing any bias into [our own research], so we are being very cautious,” said state biologist Greg Skomal, lead researcher of the shark population study, which is being funded by the non-profit Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Tracking Great White Sharks off Cape Cod by Land, by Air, by Sea

August 23, 2016 — Two days a week, from June through October, the Aleutian leaves the dock of the Chatham Bars Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts, in search of great white sharks.

Marine scientist Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries is usually on board armed with two poles: one for filming the elusive predators and another for placing acoustic tags. He’s joined by a small crew of researchers and by Atlantic White Shark Conservancy executive director and co-founder Cynthia Wigren.

“The ultimate goal, really, is to learn as much as we can about the species to be able to protect it and support the conservation of white sharks,” said Wigren.

Read the full story at ABC News

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