SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Rick Clough spent some four decades fishing for lobsters and sea urchins off the Maine coast before spotting one of the ocean’s most recognized predators — a great white shark.
The approximately 8-foot (2.4-meter) shark, seen off the beach town of Scarborough in July, surprised Clough, but didn’t make him fear the ocean — though he admitted, ‘’I’m not sure I’d want to go urchin diving now.’’
Boaters, beachgoers and fishermen like Clough who spend time in the chilly waters of New England and Atlantic Canada are learning to live with great white sharks, the creatures made famous by the 1975 film ‘’Jaws.’’ Sightings of the apex predators are up in places like Maine, where they were once very rarely spotted.
Scientists link the white shark sightings to increased availability of the seals the sharks feast on, and say beachgoers are generally very safe from shark bites. The sharks can grow close to 20 feet (6 meters) long, though most don’t get that big.
David Lancaster, a commercial clam digger in Scarborough, used a drone to get a look at an approximately 12-foot (3.6-meter) shark near the town’s famed beaches earlier this month. He described the animal as ‘’magnificent’’ and ‘’really amazing’’ to see. But he also said the shark’s presence reminded him that swimmers need to look out for the big fish.
Why are great whites going north?
Sightings of great whites off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, have become increasingly frequent in recent years, and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has documented hundreds of the animals over more than a decade. But new data shows the sharks are heading even farther north into New Hampshire, Maine and beyond, said Greg Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries and a veteran white shark researcher.
The number of white sharks detected off Halifax, Nova Scotia, increased about 2.5 times from 2018 to 2022, according to a paper published by Skomal and others in May in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. Even farther north, the number detected in the Cabot Strait that separates Nova Scotia and Newfoundland increased nearly four times over, the paper said.