Great White Shark Goes Airborne Off Nantucket
It was just a quiet Thursday night sitting in my apartment, patiently waiting on Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. to release an album 7 years in the making when panic struck. I saw an iMessage pop up on my computer from the author of Sharks Have Feelings Too. Did I have a party at the office with a Metropolitan Division hockey team that I didn’t clean up? Did I accidentally put something stupid in Stool Scenes that was going to lose us money? My hand reached over to check the message quicker than you can shake a camera while filming office drama to discover my fate.
This was not a scolding, but rather a wildlife video from the original Pageviews, and not just any type of animal encounter, it was a Great White Shark jumping fully out of the water off Nantucket Massachusetts! While it is not the 4K high definition footage seen in Shark Week’s Air Jaws, this might very well be one of, if not the first, instance of a full breach off American waters. There have been a ton of videos of them feeding on seals but the way this thing took flight is incredibly rare. I recently blogged the rise in numbers of Great White Sharks numbers off of Massachusetts and this behavior is some of the most incredible evidence of their arrival so far.
Just a couple weeks ago we saw this video from Nantucket (courtesy of some loyal Stoolies) of a Great White exploding on a Striper.
They are here and they are not playing around. Just today, Wellfleet had a meeting resembling the Town of Amity’s meeting of the minds that was centered around making the waters safer.
It seems like an overreaction to be having something like that when the waters have been perfectly safe for 80 years, but I guess more dialogue can only help everyone get on the same page.
I blogged this entire situation last week right here, but here is the crux of my argument re-posted again below.
The Cape should nurture this resource like a golden goose. Carcharodon carcharias may very well be the most impressive animal that exists on Planet Earth. There are such a small number of places where the IUCN “Vulnerable” Great Whites can be found regularly and there are even fewer places remaining where Great White Sharks still patrol freely without a million cage diving operations or baited excursions beating them over the head with frozen tunas. The Cape has a gold mine at its disposal! DINOSAURS just cruising around 30 feet off the beach. You can swim in the ocean anywhere, but the chance to see these things is a once in a lifetime rush. The solution to the “Shark Problem” in Cape Cod is to continue to promote the conservation of all of these species (Sharks AND Seals) and instead make sure the public is extremely informed about the dangers of looking like a pinniped off of those beaches! There are other idealistic hypothetical realities where public officials create safe spaces for the public to doggie paddle in these waters safely, but the harsh truth is that there is inherent risk in swimming in the ocean. There is no way around it. (Why aren’t people as fired up about the 3,536 drownings that occur on average per year in the United States?)
If we play our cards right, pretty soon the East Coast might start looking this!
h/t Dave from Swampscott