It’s already that time of year when some great white sharks are making their move north in the direction of Cape Cod for the summer and fall.
As a few tagged white sharks migrate north early, with one 9-foot male off the Long Island coast, it begs the question: When do researchers expect most of the apex predators to move toward the Cape?
The average start date for the Atlantic great white sharks’ northward push is May 15 — which is next Monday.
“The typical time when these sharks stage their move north is May 15,” OCEARCH Chief Scientist Bob Hueter told the Herald on Tuesday.
“As the water temperature starts warming past 60 degrees, then these animals will march north,” he added. “Sharks also use daylight. As days get longer, they will become more active and move farther to the north.”
Some great whites have already launched their northward migration. According to the OCEARCH shark tracker, the 9-foot male shark named Simon was recently detected off of Long Island.
“He’s early by a couple of weeks,” Hueter said, noting that there’s a lot of diversity and different personalities among white sharks. “It’s not like a herd of cows that move altogether. They sort of spread out. It’s fascinating.”
Great white shark activity again ramped up along the Cape last year, as shark detections hit an all-time high for the seventh straight year with researchers tagging more sharks in the region every summer and fall.
“You can expect to see not less, but more of these animals, which is a sign that the ocean is slowly returning to balance,” Hueter said.
“Those sharks up in Cape Cod are looking to target gray seals, and the seal population is very abundant up there,” he added, warning beachgoers to avoid getting caught between sharks and seals.
The total number of shark detections approached 200,000 for the first time last year, according to the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy tagging tracker, which was recently updated with 2022 data.
The count of 193,475 shark detections in 2022 was a record-high for the seventh straight year in the Conservancy’s White Shark Logbook. The previous all-time high from 2021 was 169,938 detections.
Last year’s count of 133 individual sharks detected was the most ever — breaking down to 1,455 receiver detections per shark. Dozens of receivers are deployed each year to track the shark activity.
The 2022 detection data again shows that white shark activity is highest along the Outer Cape in particular, where seal densities are highest.