DADDY SHARK DOO DOO DOO-DOO DOO-DOO
With holiday on horizon, great white in L.I. Sound has New York singing ...
You’re gonna need a bigger holiday.
Just in time for Memorial Day, oceanic researchers said they have tracked a great white shark off Connecticut’s coast, the first time ever that the prodigious predator of summer movie fame has been pinpointed in Long Island Sound.
According to the shark tracking group OCEARCH, the shark pinged just off the shore near Greenwich on Monday at 10:50 a.m.
Researchers tagged the nearly 10-foot male shark off Nova Scotia last year with a digital monitor and named the behemoth “Cabot.”
Since then, the 500-plus pound shark’s trek through the ocean waters has been monitored by OCEARCH and posted on social media. Cabot has traveled as far south as Florida, but his latest destination has local beachgoers all abuzz.
“The Sound is cleaner, healthier than it’s been in so many years,” said Dave Sigworth, a spokesman for the the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Conn.
“So are we going to start to see occasional large apex animals, like humpback whales. Does that mean we are going to see more large sharks from time to time as there are more opportunities? These are questions that we have to be aware of.”
Currently, there are four native sharks that swim the waters of the Sound, including blue sharks and hammerhead sharks, Sigworth said.
Matt Gates, a supervising fisheries biologist at the Connecticut’s marine fisheries headquarters, told the Hartford Courant it is likely that great whites have started slipping into the Sound of late but just have gone unnoticed.
Not since a fictional New England police chief hired a grizzled ship captain to hunt down the ornery star of a summer blockbuster have researchers been this excited about a great white shark.
OCEARCH researchers even tagged Cabot with something the “Jaws” star never got in any of his four films — his own Twitter handle.
“I heard sending a ping from the Long Island Sound had never been done before by a white shark,” Great White Shark Cabot tweeted Monday. “So naturally I had to visit and send one off. Hello Greenwich how are you today?!”
The last recorded shark attack in the Long Island Sound occurred in 1961. But great whites can move from 100 to 150 miles per day, and OCEARCH researchers said Cabot is expected to leave the Sound and continue north.
Sigworth advised shark stalkers to give Cabot his space.
“The last thing we want is for everybody to jump in a boat to try and find him,” Sigworth said. “Leave him alone.”