Cape Cod great white shark gives family a fright by snatching fish from line

Encounter captured on video shot from fishing boat

Captain: incident ‘just left everyone in awe’

Associated Press in Wellfleet, Massachusetts

Sun 21 Jul 2019 22.03 BST

A family fishing in Cape Cod Bay had a close encounter with a great white shark when it leaped from the water to snatch a fish they had caught.

Doug Nelson, of Franklin, who caught the leaping shark on video on Saturday, told New England Cable News it “gave us a pretty good scare”.

Nelson’s son Jack can be seen on the video jumping back as the shark breaches the surface to take the fish from the line.

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy confirmed it was a great white, as did Marc Costa, captain of the Orleans-based Columbia Sportfishing vessel involved.

Costa said the boat was about three miles west of Great Island in Wellfleet when the shark made its move.

The captain told the Cape Cod Times the encounter “just left everyone in awe”. One local shark researcher tweeted that it was a “good reminder that they don’t just eat seals and always be cautious when retrieving your catch”.

Great whites have returned to waters off Cape Cod in recent years, thanks in part to federal protections which have also boosted seal populations.

Last September a 26-year-old man died after being bitten by a shark off Wellfleet’s Newcomb Hollow Beach. A month before that a man suffered serious injuries in an incident off Truro, just to the north.

On Sunday the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy confirmed a report of a white shark off Nauset Beach. According to an alert, the beach was closed to swimming for an hour in the early afternoon.

Source

Frozen Sharks Washing Up on Cape Cod

By Jasmin Malik Chua, Live Science Contributor | January 6, 2018 06:18pm

As the Arctic blast continues to roil the Eastern Seaboard with gusty winds and frigid temperatures, at least four thresher sharks have been found frozen off the coast of Cape Cod.

Is Old Man Winter to blame? Probably not, as the sharks likely died not from hypothermia but from stranding themselves in shallow waters as they attempted to migrate south, according to Greg Skomal, the senior fisheries scientist who leads the shark research program for the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game.

Unlike blue sharks, mako sharks and basking sharks, thresher sharks tend to linger in the Gulf of Maine until late December, Skomal said. Characterized by their long, scythe-like tails, the animals possess endothermic abilities, meaning they can retain their metabolic heat to a certain extent. [On the Brink: A Gallery of Wild Sharks]

Indeed, a recent tagging study found that the animals leave waters only when they dip below temperatures of 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius). As a result, many of them don't start their journey to warmer climes before midwinter.

Read on  

Rising numbers of great white sharks headed toward Cape Cod, scientists say

Figure rises for second consecutive year, says Massachusetts’ top shark expert, warning of ‘public safety issue’ despite no deaths in state’s waters since 1936

Associated Press in Boston

Sunday 12 March 2017 15.20 GMT Last modified on Monday 13 March 2017 12.26 GMT 

Great white sharks are swimming toward the waters off Massachusetts in rising numbers, scientists say, after a second consecutive year showing an increase in predators to Cape Cod.

The latest data from a multiyear study of the ocean predators found that the number of sharks in waters off the vacation haven appeared to be on the rise, said Greg Skomal, a senior scientist with the Massachusetts division of marine fisheries, and the state’s top shark expert.

The sharks are after seals, not humans, and towns are using the information from the study to keep it that way. “How long does it stay and where does it go are the questions we’re trying to answer,” Skomal said. “But for the towns, it’s a public safety issue.”

Researchers using a plane and boats spotted 147 individual white sharks last summer. That was up slightly from 2015, but significantly more than the 80 individual sharks spotted in 2014, the first year of the study, funded by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.

More than half the white sharks spotted last summer had not previously been documented by this study.

Researchers have also tagged more than 100 to track their movements.

The white shark population was probably significantly larger, because the scientists could not possibly spot all of them, Skomal said.

Two of the more interesting findings are the increasing number of young sharks, and that they appear to be swimming farther afield.

Continued 

25 stranded sea turtles rescued from cold waters of Cape Cod-Mass Audubon says it has rescued 54 cold-stunned turtles this season. Lat Year Mass Audubon Rescued 600 – via Herp Digest

 WELLFLEET, Mass. (AP) — 11/23/16 — Twenty-five stranded sea turtles have been rescued from the chilly waters of Cape Cod.

The Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary says on its Facebook page rescuers found 10 sea turtles on Eastham and Wellfleet beaches Monday night and 15 more Tuesday morning.

Spokeswoman Jenette Kerr tells the Boston Globe younger turtles struggle when the water temperatures drop and slowly go into hypothermia. She says strong winds and high tides have helped rescuers by pushing the endangered turtles closer to shore, where they can be captured and sent for treatment at a New England Aquarium facility.

The turtles are eventually transported and released in warmer waters in the south by other organizations.

Mass Audubon says it has rescued 54 cold-stunned turtles this season. It rescued 600 last year.

Giant Sea Turtle's Death on Cape Cod Angers Scientists – via Herp Digest

The leatherback turtle ingested a 3-foot piece of plastic trash, got tangled in fishing gear, and was struck by a boat, officials said.

Falmouth, MA

By Jason Claffey (Patch Staff) November 13, 2015

A giant sea turtle washed up dead in Barnstable over the weekend and scientists were horrified to discover it ingested a 3-foot piece of plastic trash, got tangled in fishing gear, and was struck by a boat.

New England Aquarium officials said they have never seen a turtle killed in that manner.

The 400-pound leatherback turtle washed up on Sandy Neck Beach Sunday and was transported to the aquarium’s sea turtle hospital in Quincy for a necropsy. The findings were depressing.

The juvenile male turtle’s flippers were cut up by fishing gear, its shell was caved in from a boat strike, and there was a 3-foot piece of discarded plastic sheeting in its stomach.

“In one summer of its short life, this giant, highly endangered sea turtle had encountered a triple threat of human-caused hazards that keep this 65-million-year-old leatherback species teetering at the brink of extinction,” scientists said in a statement, adding its entanglement in fishing gear likely caused its death.

Leatherback turtle populations have been decreasing in recent years and it’s now listed as a “vulnerable” species by the World Wildlife Fund. The turtles are a critical component of marine ecosystems, as they feed on jelly fish, keeping those populations in check.

Swim On! Rescued Great White Shark Likely Still Alive

by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | August 17, 2015 01:22pm ET

A great white shark famously saved last month by Cape Cod beachgoers is likely still alive and swimming, said a shark expert.

The shark was rescued after it became stranded on a beach on July 13. Before it was released, experts pinned an acoustic tag to the shark's dorsal fin, which is on its back. A system of acoustic receivers — located about 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) south of where researchers released the shark — picked up the animal's unique signal within two weeks of the rescue, said Gregory Skomal, afisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who helped save the shark.

"It's very encouraging that the shark was alive," he told Live Science. "If I had to guess, if it survived for a couple days, it's going to survive [in the long term]."

Continued ...

Invasive Crabs Help Restore Marsh

Douglas Main, Staff Writer

Date: 04 April 2013 Time: 05:35 PM ET

You may not be able to fight fire with fire, but fighting crabs with crabs may have some merit. 

Researchers studying the imperiled marshes of Cape Cod were recently surprised to discover that a section of the marsh was coming back, sprouting a "veneer of cordgrass," according to a news release describing the study. In the places where this impressive turnabout was seen, the researchers also beheld a most unlikely cause for celebration: invasive green crabs.

Further research found these crabby immigrants were feasting upon the native marsh crab, which has overpopulated the area and eaten massive quantities of marsh grasses, leading to erosion and habitat destruction (silly marsh crabs, destroying their own eponymous environs).

Humans are largely to blame for this explosion of marsh crab, by killing their predators, including fish. And humans are also to blame for the arrival of the invasive green crab. Usually two wrongs don't make a right, but it appears, for now, the invasive greens are helping the marsh come back in two ways: Besides eating the natives, the invasive crustaceans also appear to act like "scarecrows," leading the native crabs to eat less grass.

Find the study here.

http://www.livescience.com/28461-invasive-crabs-help-restore-marsh.html

Sea Turtles continue to strand in record numbers in Cape Cod – via Herp Digest

Cape Cod Times -December 29, 2012- WELLFLEET — Massachusetts Audubon Society staff and volunteers continued to find sea turtles washing up on Cape Cod beaches during the holidays.

Nearly a dozen of these tropical turtles came ashore, their metabolism virtually shut down as a result of exposure to cold water, until they could do little but float and get pushed around by onshore winds.

Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary staff members said this year's total of 350 threatened or endangered sea turtles that have been recovered on the Cape shattered the past record of 278 set in 1999 and is the highest since they started keeping track 30 years ago.

In a statement Friday, sanctuary director Robert Prescott said the dramatic increase was likely because there were a lot more turtles in Cape Cod Bay this year.

Hurricane Sandy also helped drive many to shore in late October.

Other records were broken this year as well, including 96 loggerhead turtles retrieved from beaches, while turtle rescuers might see only a dozen in any given year.

Also, a record 228 endangered Kemp's ridley turtles were recovered, and 23 rescued green turtles nearly double the previous record.

The normal survival rate for these rescued sea turtles is 45 percent, but 65 percent survived this year, most sent to the New England Aquarium's turtle rehabilitation center in Quincy, with some going to the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay.

The New England Aquarium had to ship 75 relatively healthy or stable turtles to other facilities to make room for new arrivals.

In the statement, Prescott said sea turtles may continue to wash up on Cape beaches late into January because water temperatures have been unseasonably warm.