Another great white shark tagged with a geotracker passed right by the Bay region this week.
The nonprofit shark research group OCEARCH tracks great whites on their summer migration north (along with other apex predators), and so far this season, two of the sharks OCEARCH follows have turned up off the coast of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.
The male shark called Brunswick was spotted via location “ping” off of Virginia Beach last Tuesday, and by early Friday morning, he was just off the coast of Ocean City. Brunswick didn’t stick around the mid-Atlantic for long, though. He has covered hundreds of miles since Friday, “pinging” near Montauk on Monday and Nantucket Tuesday evening.
Brunswick is considered a sub-adult great white, at eight feet nine inches long and 431 pounds. He’s named for “the people of Brunswick, Georgia.” Since OCEARCH tagged him in Hilton Head, South Carolina in February, he’s already traveled more than 1,200 miles.
Another sub-adult male, named Cabot, pinged in Delaware Bay on May 14, as Bay Bulletin reported here.
From mid-April to mid-May, OCEARCH observed a “tight clustering of pings” off the Outer Banks in North Carolina— at least four tagged great whites staying in the same area for weeks.
This past Sunday, a teenage girl was attacked by a shark while swimming at Fort Macon State Park in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina.She survived the attack, but her leg had to be amputated, according to her family. It’s not clear which species of shark she encountered.
-Meg Walburn Viviano
