Dead seal with shark bites found on South Shore beach, sharks ‘having a feast’ off Nantucket
It seems like a bad time to be a seal in the Bay State.
While most of the focus is on great white sharks hunting for seals along Cape Cod, another dead seal with shark bites was recently spotted on a South Shore beach.
“Dead seal found on Humarock Beach (Scituate) with visible shark bites,” the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s Sharktivity app posted with a photo of the seal on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, a shark was spotted thrashing in the water off of Great Point Nantucket Island on the Fourth of July, as the apex predator devoured prey. Blood could be seen in the water.
“Sharks having a feast,” a viewer from Nantucket posted on Facebook.
Other great white sharks were spotted in Cape Cod Bay this week, as well as along Chatham, a hotbed of shark activity during the summer and fall.
This is the time of year when great white sharks migrate north to the Cape and Islands, along with other parts of the Massachusetts coast.
One of OCEARCH’s tagged sharks, Anne Bonny, is visiting Cape Cod Bay, according to its tracker.
“After touching Canadian waters in mid June she’s made her way back south to Massachusetts,” OCEARCH tweeted. “Her lasting ping was approx 4.2 nautical miles from shore.”
“We met this 9ft 3in & 425lb juvenile #WhiteShark off Ocracoke, NC in April & named her after the infamous female pirate Anne Bonny,” OCEARCH added. “This is our 1st time following her movements N and it will be exciting to see where she spends the rest of her Summer and Fall.”
Meanwhile, Shark Week (July 23 to 30) and Shark Awareness Day (July 14) are approaching, the New England Aquarium posted on Thursday.
The New England Aquarium’s shark research team does work on research vessels in Boston Harbor, Nantucket Sound, the Dry Tortugas off Florida, Georgia, and sites around the world as they tag and monitor various species — ranging from nurse sharks and oceanic white tip sharks to bull sharks, sand tigers, sandbar, and white sharks.
There are more than 500 species of sharks in the world, and scientists in the Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life have tagged more than 40 different species and related animals in the wild, many of them in New England waters.