Great white shark made early arrival to Cape
If great white sharks organize a race to the Cape ahead of summer, a nearly 11-foot sub-adult female is way ahead of the pack.
The more than 600-pound great white named Andromache has quickly migrated north to her summer home. She was recently detected off of Martha’s Vineyard, according to the OCEARCH tracker — which shows her as the only OCEARCH tagged shark along the Massachusetts coast.
Last week, it appeared that the monstrous 1,000-pound, 12-footer adult male named Ironbound would be the first OCEARCH shark to reach the Cape, but then Andromache popped up on the western edge of the Vineyard.
“She’s up there pretty early,” OCEARCH Chief Scientist Bob Hueter told the Herald this week. “She’s definitely a Cape Cod-oriented white shark, and should be there from now through the summer.
“She’s a pretty good pinger, and has given us a lot of locations all around Nantucket in past years,” Hueter added.
Throughout last May, there were 520 detections of tagged Atlantic White Shark Conservancy white sharks that swam by AWSC receivers, according to AWSC’s White Shark Logbook.
The 520 May detections compares to last year’s peak month of 57,458 detections in August.
Andromache was tagged off Nantucket during OCEARCH’s Expedition Massachusetts 2020. She has since traveled nearly 10,000 miles along the eastern seaboard. She spends much of the summer around Nantucket and Chatham’s Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge — where great white sharks search for seals.
Andromache is between 18 and 20 years old, which is the cusp of becoming a sexually mature shark in the Atlantic Ocean.
“This will be exciting to watch her transition to sexual maturity in the next year or two,” Hueter said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to pick up the offshore movements that pregnant females usually do.”
Andromache had been off of the Carolinas before quickly shooting up the coast.
The OCEARCH shark tracker shows great whites all along the eastern seaboard, including a “straggler” still in the Gulf of Mexico, Hueter said. Maple — a nearly 12-foot, more than 1,200-pound sub-adult female — was recently detected off of Tampa Bay.
She was tagged off of Nova Scotia last September.
“She’s kind of straggling compared to the rest,” Hueter said.
“It just shows you the animals don’t huddle up in an area and move together in big groups.
“White sharks get pretty spread out,” he added. “It’s fascinating to see how these individuals vary.
They keep us on our toes.”
To see where some tagged sharks are in the ocean, visit the OCEARCH Global Shark Tracker at ocearch.org/tracker, or download the OCEARCH Shark Tracker app.