The shark with 120,000 followers online
Mary Lee charming humans, helping researchers uncover a 400-million-year-old secret
She is somewhere in her 40s or 50s, has more than 120,000 followers on Twitter (where she can sometimes be quite flirtatious) and enjoys summering along the Jersey Shore and the Hamptons.
She weighs about 2,000 kilograms and is around five metres long. If you’re a seal or a squid, you had better be careful when she comes around.
Meet Mary Lee, a great white shark identified in fall 2012 by Ocearch, an organization that researches and tracks marine species.
In the five years since the team pulled Mary Lee out of the waters near Cape Cod in Massachusetts to tag her and collect blood and tissue samples, she has travelled nearly 65,000 kilometres.
Ocearch traces the path by plotting the pings that occur every time Mary Lee’s dorsal fin surfaces; it is tagged with a device linked to a satellite. During the past three summers, Mary Lee has been a regular on the U.S. Northeastern Seaboard, cruising along the Jersey Shore and the Hamptons, Fire Island and Montauk, N.Y., attracting the attention of residents and tourists with each visit.
“She has become sort of a mascot,” said Andy Brosnan, the chair of the Eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. “Even before she showed up last time, people were like, ‘Has anybody seen anything about Mary Lee?’ ”
In June, Mary Lee appeared near Atlantic City. Though she surfaces often on Ocearch’s interactive map, it is hard to say whether any person has actually encountered Mary Lee since the marine biologists dropped her back into the water in 2012.
But even a map of Mary Lee’s movements is enough to help scientists shed more light on a mysterious species. For example, to find the location of a great white nursery last year, the Ocearch crew had to piece together several clues.
“We first got an idea of where the sharks were mating, and because females have an 18-month gestation period, you can follow them for 18 months and get an idea of where they’re birthing,” said Chris Fischer, the founder of Ocearch.
From the group’s work in the Pacific, it gathered that for great whites, mating occurs in late fall to early winter, which would mean birthing happens around May or June. In May of last year, Mary Lee travelled past Fire Island and into the waters off East Hampton, leading the researchers to hypothesize that a nursery could be nearby. They found it not far from Montauk, where they tagged nine pups, allowing the researchers to trace the migratory patterns of great whites in their early years.
“We’re starting to put this North Atlantic white shark puzzle together,” Fischer said. “It’s a 400-millionyear secret.”
Secretive or not, Mary Lee has managed to capture the imagination of many. Scroll through recent ret- weets in her Twitter feed and you will see concerned followers, asking where she has been and praising her. “She’s the most famous real shark in history,” Fischer said.
“I think the name Mary Lee resonates,” said Fischer, who named her after his mother. “It’s a gentle name for such an ocean giant.” (And no, he said, he does not run her Twitter account. “Mary Lee manages her own,” he said. He surmised that her “matriarchal and clever personality” has enamored followers.)
Neil Hammerschlag, a research assistant professor in the Shark Research & Conservation Program at the University of Miami, suggested that some of Mary Lee’s popularity had to do more with the high-profile efforts of Ocearch and the category of shark that Mary Lee belongs to.
“Ocearch coupled a TV show with their work,” Hammerschlag said, referring to the 2012 History Channel program Shark Wranglers, “and they had a strong social-media campaign.”
And there is no denying that great white sharks are the ultimate predators. “Great whites generate more public attention than other species,” Hammerschlag said. “They’re responsible for the most fatalities on people worldwide. People are afraid of them, and this feeds the public’s curiosity.”
According to the International Shark Attack File, sharks attacked humans with no provocation 81 times in 2016. In contrast, an average of 3,536 unintentional drownings occur in the United States each year, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Sharks strike an inherent survival instinct and a primal fear,” Fischer said. “Nobody wants to be eaten. But it’s an irrational fear that doesn’t statistically exist.”
“We’re trying to undo everything that Jaws did,” he added. “If we don’t have a lot of Mary Lees, our children won’t be able to eat fish sandwiches. If they go, the entire system goes.”
The great white population on the Northeast Coast, which includes Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where Jaws was filmed, has rebounded in recent years. In 2003, scientists concluded that the great white population had dropped by 79 per cent from 1986 to 2000. But conservation efforts in the 1990s, including a federal law prohibiting the removal of fins from sharks’ bodies, have brought the creatures back within feeding distance of the Hamptons and Cape Cod. A resurgence of seals, a favoured snack of the great white shark, may have encouraged the sharks’ return, as well.
“All of a sudden, they’re in people’s backyards, not in Australia or South Africa,” Hammerschlag said. “Great white sharks make news. Great white sharks in your backyard make news even more.”