Go ahead, make my day!
Sand, sun, waves and sharks are all in the local forecast for Memorial Day weekend.
Not less than 4 male great white sharks have been lurking in the waters between Latest York and Latest Jersey recently.
The non-profit marine research group Ocearch tags and tracks man-eaters, collecting data each time someone breaks to the surface and their electronic tracker “pings”.
Listed below are the monsters around:
- Simon, a 9-foot-6,434-pound toothed shark, surfaced on May 2, close enough to sunbathe on Fire Island.
- Jekyll, 8 meters long and 395 kilos, “pinged” on May 15 near the favored island of Long Beach, Latest Jersey.
- Keji, the 9-foot-7,578-pound beast, was spotted 40 miles off Long Island on May 17.
- Frosty, a 9-foot-2-inch, 393-pound fish, pinged off Montauk on May 21.
While Latest Yorkers may not need an even bigger boat, eight of the world’s 57 unprovoked shark attacks last yr – or 14% – occurred in Latest York City, all on Long Island beaches, in line with the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File.
The terrifying shark scorecard began on June 30, when A 57-year-old man suffered a laceration to his right foot while swimming in the ocean at Jones Beach in Wantagh.
Five of the 2022 Long Island shark attacks occurred over three weeks in July, including the rescuers bitten on July 3 and July 7; two men bitten one another in separate incidents over the course of several hours on July 13; and a 16-year-old surfer bit on July 20.
The last two shark attacks occurred on August 9 at Ponquogue Beach in Hampton Bays and on September 1 near Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island, but investigators didn’t know any details about these events.
In accordance with the state Department of Environmental Protection, the non-fatal attacks were committed by sand tigers and other small sharks.
The Long Island encounters are believed “to have been the result of the sharks misidentifying the victim,” DEC spokeswoman Stephanie Rekemeyer said.
Ocearch chief scientist Bob Hueter agreed, noting, “It’s kind of like their nursery off Long Island. They usually have not really learned to inform the difference between the appropriate victim and the people yet—they are not really interested in us, they usually’re making a mistake.
“But they’ve sharp teeth, and it’s never good to be bitten by them.”
A 15-year-old girl was attacked by a shark while browsing off the coast of Stone Harbor, Latest Jersey last weekend.
Mobilizing on crutches as a consequence of her injuries on Monday, Maggie Drozdowski said her close encounter with the apex predator had left her “traumatic”. The young surfer suffered deep lacerations to her left foot and calf that required six stitches.
In accordance with the Florida databasethe likelihood of a shark attack in Garden State is incredibly rare.
Before last week’s misfortune, there was only 15 unprovoked shark attacks in Jersey, with the last one in 2006.
What concerning the Fin-tastic 4 currently pinging in local waters?
“All of these 4 guys have the choice of going to Cape Cod or Nova Scotia,” Hueter said.
“Half of our sharks go to the areas around Massachusetts and feed in the summer, and the opposite half go to the Atlantic Ocean in Canada and feed on seals and other fish there.”
“The likelihood that any swimmer will encounter any of the sharks we’ve got tagged is actually zero. But understand that we only tagged an infinitesimally small fraction of all of the sharks that live there” – noted the scientist.
“Shark watching is definitely an excellent thing,” Hueter said.
“We’re rebuilding our shark populations, that are getting back from being on the brink of total collapse 30 years ago. And the rationale we’re rebuilding them is to rebalance the oceans and make them healthier,” he said.
Nonetheless, he added that swimmers and surfers need to contemplate their surroundings.
“People have a responsibility to behave properly and never to think of the ocean as an enormous swimming pool. It is a wild place. It’s like climbing in a national park. You might have to exercise some caution.”