Great white shark washes up on Nantucket
Discovery provides a rare opportunity
This one was for real. State shark specialists have determined that a big fish that washed up on a beach in Nantucket Monday was a 6 1/2-foot great white shark.
It is a rare find for the scientists, who have not seen a great white carcass wash up on a Massachusetts beach in at least two decades, said Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
"It's an opportunity to try to learn something," she said.
The discovery of the young female shark's carcass at a beach off Sheep Pond Road follows an unconfirmed sighting by lifeguards last week that led to the closing of South Beach on Martha's Vineyard.
Another sighting reported at the Vineyard's State Beach caused a commotion but turned out to be a hoax.
A Division of Marine Fisheries specialist dispatched to Nantucket yesterday confirmed that the carcass was a great white.
State specialists, along with scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service, planned to dissect it today to determine the cause of death and collect other data, said Capone, whose office oversees the division.
Greg Skomal, the state's top shark specialist, said that great whites occasionally get caught in fishermen's nets and that scientists are then able to study them. But it was the first time in his career that he had seen a dead one wash up on shore.
He welcomed the chance to take a look at the animal, which, he said, is difficult to study in the Atlantic because it is thought to typically stay far offshore hunting for dead whale carcasses.
"It's really kind of an enigma in the Atlantic," he said. "It's really a problem for scientists trying to study the shark."
In 2004, a live great white was trapped for two weeks in a lagoon on Naushon Island, off of Cape Cod, which gave Skomal and other researchers another rare opportunity to study the animal.
Dave Fronzuto, Nantucket's harbormaster, said people on the island were not alarmed about Monday's find.
"Nobody's not swimming because of this issue," he said.
He said sightings are reported frequently, but it is not clear how many are valid. "It could be a shark; it could be anything. You see a fin, you don't know what it is," he said.
Sometimes, though, sightings are considered serious enough that a beach will be closed in the direction the animal is reported to be swimming.
"We just close the appropriate beach, . . . keep an eye on it," he said. "This is my 20th year and I've never had a problem."
Lifeguards said they saw the dorsal fin of a huge shark Thursday, sticking out of the water 75 yards offshore at South Beach on the Vineyard.
The Vineyard has a special connection to great whites because parts of the movie "Jaws" were filmed there. The state sent a plane to scan the waters, but spotters saw nothing unusual, and the sighting remains unconfirmed. 