Cape Cod Revealed As One of the Largest White Shark Hotspots in the World

Cape Cod is known for being a shark hotspot, but new research has confirmed this, finding that nearly 1,000 individual great white sharks have visited the area in recent years.

In a first-ever estimate of white shark abundance in the North Atlantic, 800 of these predators visited the waters off Cape Cod between 2015 and 2018, according to research published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. This number may also vary anywhere between 393 and 1286 individuals.

"One of the big questions we've been trying to answer since 2014 is how many white sharks are coming here every year," Megan Winton, a marine biologist at UMass Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) and staff scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC), and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Winton and the other researchers from AWSC, SMAST, and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) reviewed several thousand videos of sharks in the area, identifying 393 individual sharks from their unique markings, and using statistical modeling to estimate there having been 800 sharks in the area across the three years.

This makes Cape Cod one of the most popular great white hotspots in the world. They also discovered that the numbers of sharks off Cape Cod peaked in late summer and at the beginning of fall when water temperatures were at their peak, with shark numbers declining as the water cools during the winter.

Great whites are one of the largest species of shark in the world, growing up to 20 feet long and weighing as much as 5,000 pounds. They are found in temperate regions around the world and are a much-feared species due to their higher frequency of attacks and injuries compared to other species.

Usually, these sharks migrate with the seasons, heading north for the summer months towards Canada, then south again during the winter, often being sighted off Florida. However, not all great whites follow this pattern, with many breaking the mold.

"While many white sharks head south [in the winter] not all do," Gavin Naylor, director at the Florida Program for Shark Research, previously told Newsweek. Patterns of movement in these animals show a lot of individual variation."

While these figures off Cape Cod may sound terrifying, the authors emphasize that these numbers are nothing to fear.

"[That] does sound like a really big number, but I think we need to put that in the context that it's over a four-year period, and not all of them are here at the same time," Gregory Skomal, a shark biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and co-author of the paper, told local news the Nantucket Current. "I don't think the public should be too alarmed."

"I think it should be business as usual," Skomal said. "The reason we did this study was to give beach managers and the general public an understanding of the number of sharks that visit here."

The authors hope that these findings will reveal more about the secrets of great white sharks and why they aggregate in certain areas, which will in turn help to protect the species from extinction.

"Because it directly links changes in abundance over time to the demographic processes underpinning them, the model described provides a more mechanistic understanding of the dynamics of white shark aggregations and improves the applied relevance of the results for the conservation and management of the species," the authors wrote in the paper.

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