A six-foot dead seal washed up on Lucy Vincent Beach this week with a fatal wound from what experts believe was a great white shark.
Andrew Jacobs, laboratory manager and environmental technician for the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, received a call Sunday, May 10, about a stranded seal. Jacobs said he went out Monday, May 11, to perform a minor investigation on the dead animal, and found that “markings of the wound” were “consistent with shark predation.”
The department is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Greater Atlantic Region Marine Mammal Stranding Network, and responds to local calls of stranded, entangled, or injured marine mammals and sea turtles.
It does happen, Jacobs said, though a shark-bitten seal isn’t very common for the Island. He recalled one in 2020.
Jacobs said the wound was likely from a great white shark; the bite diameter on the wound was 12 to 14 inches, he estimated. The species is known to start to pass through Island waters off the south shore in late April and early May on their way to Cape Cod, where there are higher seal densities, as well as the Gulf of Maine and Canada. White sharks typically treat Island waters as a highway, and don’t set up there. The bulk of the population moves north in June and July.
“This doesn’t surprise me,” Dr. Greg Skomal, a senior biologist at the state Division of Marine Fisheries, who works with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, and is known as the modern-day Matt Hooper, the marine biologist in “Jaws.”
Skomal said that this was likely a white shark. Based on pictures shared by Jacobs, he didn’t, however, think this was a new bite — this didn’t happen in the past few days, because the wound was washed out and almost looked somewhat healed. There isn’t a lot of fresh blood, which tells him that this attack didn’t happen close to the beach.
The wound was definitely fatal, Skomal added, because the abdominal cavity was penetrated. He said that the seal could have been miles out to sea, was bitten, and then drifted toward the Island.
The seal is located about a quarter-mile east of the entrance of Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark, Jacobs said.
If you see a stranded, distressed, or dead marine mammal, contact a local stranding network partner or call NOAA’s stranding hotline at 866-755-6622.