A Great White Shark Nursery Is Home To Hundreds In These NY Waters
This interactive shark tracker may come in handy more often than we’d like it to at the beach this summer as National Geographic has revealed that more than just beachgoers are swimming offshore the Long Island coast.
Just offshore in the New York Bight, the Atlantic Continental Shelf waters off Long Island, NY, and NJ, hundreds (yes, hundreds) of baby great white sharks live together in “what researchers now believe to be the North Atlantic’s primary—and probably only—great white shark nursery.”
And while this isn’t exactly new news–shark scientists have had an inkling this shark nursery has been here since the mid-1980s–its existence has only recently been confirmed.
Megan Winton, a research scientist with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, stated:
As far as we know, the Long Island shark nursery is where all baby [great white] sharks in the North Atlantic spend their first year of life. And it just happens to be near one of the most densely populated areas of the U.S. coastline.
As part of an ongoing research project, Winton and her colleagues attached a camera tag to a young female shark (named Liberty as an homage to the NYC landmark) for the first time ever. Not only does the camera track the shark’s movements, it also provides vital insight critical to protecting them.
You can watch Winton and her team catch Liberty and attach the camera tag here:
Winton stated, “We know virtually nothing about baby white sharks…It’s really uncharted territory as far as white shark science goes.”
One thing they do know though–”while no one has ever seen a white shark give birth, the fact that they show up every year in May and June in such numbers suggested they’re born nearby,” according to Tobey Curtis, a fishery management specialist with NOAA’s Office of Sustainable Fisheries.
So, naturally, it’s important to study them, especially since baby sharks spend almost all their time within the nursery, according to research. In fact, National Geographic writes that “more than 90% of them remain within 12 miles of the shore, swimming parallel to the eastern Long Island coastline.”
So, where is the nursery exactly, and what are these baby great white sharks doing there?
The nursery–which can produce up to 200 great white sharks per year–is located in a triangular area between Montauk Point, Long Island, Cape May, NJ, and NYC.
As for what the sharks are doing, they’re learning how to feed, navigate, and evade predators.
At the end of the day, Curtis states that Long Island’s great white shark nursery should be looked at as a “conservation success story.” The North Atlantic population of great whites was once nearing extinction due to overfishing, though it’s grown in recent years due to the resurgence of the gray seal, i.e. their prey.
The population is now estimated at around 800.
Curtis stated:
It’s amazing that the ocean is healthy enough to have these abundant fish populations, including abundant shark populations, right outside New York City and Long Island. Even with all those millions of people near the shore and the impact on the waterways, the ecosystem is healthier now than it’s been in a long time.
Oh, and by the way, yes, these are the same waters that the world’s second largest animal are also living in.
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