[ad_1]
[Cequevousdevezsavoirpourbiencommencerlajournée:[Whatyouneedtoknowtostarttheday:[Cequevousdevezsavoirpourbiencommencerlajournée:[Whatyouneedtoknowtostarttheday:Receive New York today in your inbox.]
Maaaaaybe shark? Doo doo doo doo doo doo
The shark frenzy created this week by tracking a great white shark swimming in the Long Island Strait may have been sa little unfounded.
On Monday morning, Ocearch, a marine life research organization, said it spotted a large white swim off the coast of Connecticut, west of the area.
The sighting of the aquatic predator, which occurred a few days before the Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of the summer beach season, created a veritable sharknado of headlines and messages on social networks .
"It was in the sound or it never was," said John Kanaly, spokesman for Ocearch. "We calculated that he would not have had time to go around the island."
If all the Ocearch data were accurate, the shark would have had to travel nearly 200 miles in half a day – a trip that, according to Mr. Kanaly, was not likely. He added that the discrepancy was probably due to problems with the shark tracker.
Ocearch, which has been tagging and tracking sea creatures since 2007, had a "fairly high degree of certainty" on Monday morning about the fact that the shark tracker was correct, Kanaly said.
The group's online tracking map showed three pings between 8 am and 11 am from the shark tracker near Greenwich, Connecticut, a town of about 60,000 near the western end of Long Island Sound. , with a length of 110 miles.
Mr. Kanaly explained that Ocearch wanted to share its location, given the proximity of the shark to the coast. Ocearch announced on Twitter on Monday that it was the "first time" that the organization had spotted a great white shark in the sound.
A quick search on Twitter proved that this was not the case. In September 2016, Ocearch reported that it had followed a Juvenile shark in Long Island Strait, far from the coast south of Guilford, in Conn.
On Tuesday, Kanaly said the shark hunted this week was the first large white shark to ping in the Long Island Strait. He also stated that Ocearch had never seen a big white trip so close to the shore.
The shark in question, a big white, was first flagged off the coast of Nova Scotia last October. The researchers eventually gave him the name of Cabot, according to the Italian explorer John Cabot.
The marine predator weighed 533 pounds at the time and was 9 feet 8 inches long.
By comparison, this length gives Cabot about 40% of the size of the main threat of "Jaws", a huge 25-foot shark both mechanical and fictional. (So, no, you probably are not go need a bigger boat.)
Nevertheless, Cabot could continue to grow, according to Dr. Tobey Curtis, shark expert and fisheries management specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service.
The shark is currently classified as "sub-adult sharks," said Dr. Curtis – essentially a shark teenager.
Since Ocearch began following Cabot, it has moved from Nova Scotia south to south, hitting the Gulf of Mexico in January before doubling and heading north along the east coast.
The migration pattern was typical of the sharks of Cabot's age and size, said Dr. Curtis. But, he said, a shark traveling in the Long Island Strait, if confirmed, would be unusual.
While the sound has four species of native sharks, great white sharks are not among them, according to Dave Sigworth, a spokesman for the Norwalk Sea Aquarium, in Conn.
However, it is known that great white sharks migrate along the south coast of Long Island as the water warms up during the summer, said Dr. Curtis. The researchers had previously identified a nursery for newborn and juvenile sharks in this region, he said.
"This is the only part of the east coast where there is a large population of newborn and juvenile white sharks," said Dr. Curtis.
After a prolonged decline, it is thought that the large white population is bouncing Dr. Curtis said. He drew attention to the growing number of observations that the measures taken by the federal government to ban white shark fishing had worked.
Nevertheless, despite the new abundance of sharks, rest assured, Mr Sigworth said: "It's O.K. swim in the sound. "
Shark attacks are relatively rare, said Dr. Curtis. "Millions of people are swimming in the ocean every year," he added, "and the risk of interactions, even in hot spots, is very low."
The last shark attack in Long Island Strait took place in 1961, Sigworth said, and humans were probably more of a threat to a shark than us.
[ad_2]
Source link