Several towns around the Northeast, including beach and vacation hotspots like Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Long Island, New York, have seen a spike in shark activity over the past few weeks – at times issuing temporary swimming restrictions out of fear of incident.
Video captured by resident Nick Gault on a boat near the shore of Nantucket around Great Point shows the water dyed blood-red as a shark feasted on a seal, its carcass washing up on shore where seabirds started pecking at it.
Great Point, which hosts the Costaka-Coatue Wildlife Refuge owned by the Trustees of Reservations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has prohibited swimming in the area after numerous shark sightings, the Nantucket Current reported.
Several residents posted videos over the past week showing sightings, and officials felt they had to take action due to the many visitors who are "naïve to their surroundings."
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"Those videos are pretty troubling and no human could survive that, we know that," Diane Lang, Trustees of Reservations stewardship manager on Nantucket, told the Nantucket Current in an interview. "The policy is in place now. We're telling our visitors no swimming at Great Point."
"I was in touch with U.S. Fish & Wildlife and they're in full agreement," Lang stressed, adding that the policy is new but "needed."
Lang also noted that the seal population around the preserve seems to have completely vanished following a few shark attacks like the one in Gault’s video, saying "They’re gone. They saw."
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Climate change in recent years has forced some shark populations, like the tiger shark, to migrate farther north earlier in the year due to rising ocean temperatures close to the equator, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"Our tagging and tournament sampling data show that tiger sharks have always spent time in northern latitudes at least going back to the 1960s and 1970s," Cami McCandless, study co-author and lead for the NOAA Fisheries’ Apex Predators Program, wrote on the issue.
"Now they are not only arriving earlier but spending more time in northern latitudes due to ocean warming," she said.
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New York's Long Island has reported a number of shark incidents this month alone, with five people bitten in a two-day period as a school of some 50 tiger sharks passed the shoreline around July 4, The New York Post reported.
State officials approved the deployment of shark-monitoring drones along the New York coastline to try and preempt any further incidents, along with lifeguards on WaveRunners to monitor the waters.
"These new drones will increase the shark monitoring capacity of local governments across Long Island and New York City, ensuring local beaches are safe for all beachgoers," New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a press release.
