Go ahead, mako my day!
Sand, sun, surf, and sharks are in the local forecast for Memorial Day weekend.
At least four male great whites have been lurking in the New York-New Jersey waters recently.
Non-profit marine research group Ocearch tags and tracks the man-eaters, collecting data each time one breaks the surface, and their electronic tracker “pings.”
Here are the monsters in the neighborhood:
- Simon, a toothy 9-foot-6, 434-pound shark, surfaced on May 2, close enough to be sunbathing on Fire Island.
- Jekyll, an 8-foot-8, 395-pounder, “pinged” on May 15 near popular Long Beach Island, NJ.
- Keji, a 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 on May 21 off Montauk.
While New Yorkers may not need to get a bigger boat, eight out of 57 of the world’s unprovoked shark attacks last year — or 14% — occurred in New York, all at Long Island beaches, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File.
The scary shark scorecard started June 30 when a 57-year-old man suffered a laceration on his right foot while swimming in the ocean at Jones Beach in Wantagh.
Five of the 2022 Long Island shark attacks took place within three weeks in July, including lifeguards bitten on July 3 and July 7; two men chomped on in separate incidents within hours on July 13; and a 16-year-old surfer gnawed on July 20.
The final two shark strikes occurred on Aug. 9 at Ponquogue Beach in Hampton Bays and Sept. 1 off Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island, but researchers had no details on those.
The non-fatal assaults were committed by sand tigers and other small sharks, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The Long Island encounters are believed to “have been the result of sharks misidentifying prey,” said DEC spokeswoman Stephanie Rekemeyer.
Ocearch Chief Scientist Bob Hueter agreed, noting: “That’s kind of their nursery ground off of Long Island. And they haven’t really learned yet how to discriminate correct prey from people — they’re not interested in us really and make a mistake.
“But they have sharp teeth and it’s never good to be bitten by one.”
A 15-year-old girl was attacked by a shark while surfing off the coast of Stone Harbor, NJ last weekend.
Moving around on crutches due to her injuries Monday, Maggie Drozdowski said her close encounter with the apex predator left her “traumatized.” The young surfer sustained deep lacerations to her left foot and calf requiring six stitches.
According to the Florida database, the odds of a shark attack in the Garden State are extremely rare.
Prior to last week’s mishap, there had been only 15 unprovoked shark attacks in Jersey, with the most recent being in 2006.
As for the Fin-tastic Four currently pinging in local waters?
“All four of these guys have the possibility of going to either Cape Cod or Nova Scotia,” Hueter said.
“Half our sharks go to areas around Massachusetts and feed in the summertime and the other half go to Atlantic Canada and feed on the seals and other fish that are up there.”
“The odds of any swimmer encountering any of the sharks that we tagged is essentially zero. But understand we’ve only tagged an infinitesimal fraction of all the sharks that live out there,” the scientist noted.
“Shark sightings are actually a good thing,” Hueter said.
“We’re rebuilding our shark populations that are coming back from being on the brink of total collapse 30 years ago. And the reason that we’re rebuilding them is to re-establish ecological balance in the oceans and make them healthier,” he said.
But swimmers and surfers need to consider their surroundings, he added.
“There is a responsibility for people to behave properly and not think of the ocean as a giant swimming pool. It’s a wild place. It’s like going for a hike in a national park. You have to exercise certain caution.”
