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Meet Bella, the great white shark.
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Or maybe you’d prefer not to?
The enormous apex predator, weighing a whopping 729 pounds and measuring about 10 feet, two inches in length, was just spotted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, according to Time Out Montreal.
Apparently, as summer temperatures rise, great white sharks are increasingly known to travel as far north as Canada.
Florida-based Ocearch tracking, which monitors shark movements across the North Atlantic using satellite tagging technology, says Bella was seen moving through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the northern edge of the Quebec archipelago.
It says Bella, who was first tagged and released on July 18, 2025, in Mahone Bay, N.S., by the Tancook Islands Marine Field Station team, last transmitted a signal on July 6 at 10:51 a.m.
The tagging is part of research studying great white shark migration patterns, behaviour, and seasonal feeding habits in Atlantic Canada.
And if you think Bella is large, Ocearch says the largest shark found in Canada is the Greenland shark, which can grow up to 6.4 metres long and weigh more than 2,000 pounds. It lives in the cold, deep waters of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.
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Bella’s journey began in Cape Cod
Ocearch says that, over the past month, Bella travelled from Cape Cod into the Gulf of Maine, then along the Nova Scotia coast and near P.E.I. before continuing north toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Her name, meaning “beautiful” in Italian, was chosen in honour of a supporter of Ocearch.
Bella’s presence shouldn’t be interpreted “as an unusual event,” said the St. Lawrence Shark Observatory, adding in a news release that the first detection primarily serves as a reminder that white sharks are “now regular seasonal visitors.”
The Gulf of St. Lawrence has a healthy seal population that attracts great white sharks during the summer months.
As usual, people in the area are cautioned to use common sense when swimming, such as avoiding murky waters, not swimming at dawn and dusk, and don’t swim where there are seals in the area.
Shark attacks in general are extremely rare in Canada, according to the St. Lawrence Shark Observatory’s Canadian Shark Attack Registry, per CBC News, with only 15 confirmed attacks over the past 330 years and only one confirmed shark-related human death in 1953.
And that fatality, according to the registry, was a fisherman who drowned when a white shark rammed a fishing boat off the coast of Fourchu, N.S.
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