The sharks hunt in the swells along some 40 miles of beachfront managed by the Cape Cod National Seashore. The public safety implications are obvious. The sharks are most concentrated by Massachusetts during June through October-the same time of year when more than three million vacationers regularly flock to the cape. Cape Cod joins established hotspots in South Africa, central California, Mexico’s Guadalupe Island and Australia’s Neptune Islands.
Renowned shark expert Greg Skomal, who has studied white sharks off the coast of New England since the early 1980s, says he didn’t encounter one anywhere near Cape Cod until 2004 and didn’t tag his first one there until 2009.Ī new study shows that this peninsula’s eastern shoreline now hosts one of the largest seasonal white shark gatherings in the world and is the first such hotspot documented in the North Atlantic. The upsurge over the past decade has caught just about everyone by surprise, including marine scientists. Once rare in this area, great white sharks-hundreds of them-are hunting in the shallow waters along the beaches of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
