The water looked like glass as the center-console fishing boat, refitted for sharking, left Ryder’s Cove at 9 am, drove past Chatham Bar through a natural inlet that moves and shifts to the will of Mother Nature, and entered what Capt. Josh Higgins calls “shark country.”
It only took about 15 minutes from the dock to enter the open ocean on July 20.
And only another minute or two went by before Wayne Davis, hundreds of feet above the ground in his two-seat, high-wing propeller plane, thought he spotted a white shark off the beaches of Chatham on Cape Cod and radioed down to Higgins at around 9:16 am. Davis, a Vietnam War veteran and a former fish spotter, said he saw a dark shadow against the whitewashed sand, near the south end of North Beach Island. Davis’s plane holds a belly tank, Higgins said, and he could spend up to 12 hours in the sky, eyes always peeled for sharks.
Monday was the fourth tagging excursion for the nonprofit Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC) team this summer, and as Higgins navigated towards Davis’ marked shadow, the boat passed several receivers placed out in open ocean by the conservancy that run parallel to the coast to pick up on tagged sharks.
Dr. Greg Skomal, a senior biologist at the state Division of Marine Fisheries and fondly recognized as the modern-day Matt Hooper, the marine biologist in “Jaws,” made his way out to the pulpit; in his hand he had a GoPro attached to essentially a very, very long “selfie stick.” The shadow didn’t move much, though, and Skomal realized that what Davis spotted really was just a shadow, an optical illusion created by the sun, waves, and whatever laid beneath the water. Skomal’s used to that; his book about great white sharks is literally called “Chasing Shadows.”
Less than 10 minutes later, though, Davis, who can see through about 25 feet of water, radioed again. This time, through clock bearing directions (“1:30 westbound”) and some “3 boats ahead,” Davis brought the boat right next to a 10.5-foot dark mass that moved.
Upon initial inspection, he appeared like a dark shadow against the ocean bottom, but as he gradually came up to the surface, that mass became a great white shark named Pearl — whose width was almost more impressive than his length.
Pearl was first identified in 2019 and tagged by Skomal and the conservancy at the end of September in 2022; since then, through an array of acoustic receivers located from Monomoy Point to Provincetown, he’s been detected over 7,000 times, according to the conservancy’s “Sharktivity” app. Because Pearl was already tagged, Skomal only used the GoPro to get some underwater footage.
“Animals in general, fish in general … They’re creatures of habit, and it really boils down to how successful they are in feeding in an area,” Skomal said about Pearl who’s come back to the Cape multiple years. Some individuals are transient, he added, and don’t stay long probably because they don’t successfully feed so the habitat isn’t “energetically beneficial.”
The team saw four other sharks besides Pearl that day — three white sharks, another of which was already tagged, and a basking shark. It was a good day in terms of sightings, Skomal said. In previous years, they’ve had some very slow Julys.
Sharks typically “overwinter” much farther offshore or down south and come up to Massachusetts waters as temperatures warm, much like fish, and move back down or out in early November. Skomal said they typically trickle in, and noted a “very credible report” of a shark-bitten seal that washed up on Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark in May. Still, the bulk of the white shark population, especially the larger ones, doesn’t come through until July or August.
Skomal said there’s a chance, however, that some of the white sharks bypass Cape Cod and move straight up to the Gulf of Maine or Canada. “We’re going to look at this,” he said. He also said that if that’s true, he wants to know the reason — water temperature, climate change, or restoration of natural prey to the area.
Since 2009, Skomal’s tagged 400 individual sharks, though probably only 250 tags are still active, others either died or were eventually shed off by the animal. Skomal uses a tag technique developed in 1964 where he places a small intramuscular dart at the base of the shark’s dorsal fin. The tags can tell Skomal when the shark is going up or down, left or right as well as speeding up and slowing down.
On Monday, he tagged a shark that was about 300 yards off of the beach in 12 feet of water. It was a 10-footer that was marked down as MA2602. All tagged sharks, with photos and demographics, are added to the “Shartivity” app, and from then on, all live detections are marked on the map of the Cape. Skomal also takes a post-tag video to check on his deployment of the sensor.
The acoustic tags emit high frequency sounds that are picked up by the receivers in the water.
As the boat glided along Pearl and another tagged white shark, an 11-foot male named Baobab who Davis found because he followed the shark’s algae track, Dr. Lauren Brewster, assistant professor of fisheries oceanography for SMAST at UMass Dartmouth, let out the cord of a hydrophone that broadcast the tag’s sound back on the boat. Patrick Rex, a research scientist for the conservancy, was then able to identify the white shark by the tag’s frequency.
White sharks are large pelagic animals that travel great distances across the ocean. “It’s incredibly challenging to get an understanding of their basic biology,” Skomal said. “That’s why many shark species have lagged behind other species,” in terms of human’s knowledge of them.
Skomal and the conservancy set up five live receivers, marked yellow and with solar panels, along the east side of the Cape as well as 70 other tall spar buoy acoustic receivers that are placed from Rhode Island to New Hampshire. The data on the non-live receivers are collected when they’re hauled for maintenance at the beginning of every year.
There were attempts to put receivers on either side of the Vineyard by Skomal, who used to live on the Island and studied sharks there for over two decades, in some of the earlier years of his research, but they never indicated that there was a residency of sharks, those that stay for a few months, near the area. It wasn’t until the 2000s that white sharks were seen in New England or in Island waters; a 13-foot female was found trapped in a small pond on Naushon Island in 2004.
“We really haven’t been able to start intensively studying white sharks in the Atlantic until they became predictably present off of Cape Cod,” Skomal said; seals, sharks’ preferred prey, made a comeback after an almost extinction. Previously, scientists relied only on dead specimens that were brought in by fishermen; now, they can track their movements through tag technology.
Sharks use the waters off the Island as a highway, Skomal said. “There’s no real number of seals to concentrate white sharks long.” Even near Nomans Island, where Skomal said he’s heard there are a lot of seals, his old receiver didn’t pick up many detections, which was a surprise to him.
“The bottom line is we don’t know a heck of a lot. Although we’ve studied them hard, there’s so much we still need to know,” Skomal said.
Recently, a 13-foot, 9-inch shark called Contender has been in the news as the largest male white shark tagged in the Atlantic. But, Skomal has tagged larger ones.
James, first tagged in 2014, is a 14-foot male. Meanwhile, Skomal said he’s tagged 16 and 18-foot females.
And Luke, a 13-foot white shark, was tagged June 24, 2016. Skomal said he named him in honor of Luke Gurney, who died that year fishing in his boat No Regrets off Nantucket. The shark’s been detected over 30,000 times, one of the highest number of detections, Skomal said. Skomal also participated in the ninth annual Fluke For Luke tournament this month.
Skomal works for the state, which pays his salary, but he co-founded the conservancy in 2013 with Cynthia Wigren to fund other, at times costly expenses in order to do his research. Sometimes, Skomal needs to either hire a boat and plane, or at the very least pay for the fuel to study sharks in the wild.
Skomal’s interested in fine-scale behavior of sharks: What do they do — not just day to day but hour to hour, minute to minute, and second to second. What drives their behavior? How does that relate to their age and life stage? Also, how do they reproduce? “Nobody on Earth can tell you where that happens,” Skomal said.
The white sharks are very solitary, a lone wolf, but at some point, they have to mate. “That’s my fascination,” Skomal said.
“The more time I spend with these animals, the better understanding I’m getting of them,” he said, even just their behavior around the boat when he goes out to tag them. When one white shark saw the GoPro, it turned toward the boat, and then shot away. Skomal called that one “squirrel-ly,” and he wasn’t able to tag the animal.
