Who would have expected this December a great white shark would wash up just north of Crystal Pier? The dead great white, a juvenile female, about 11 feet long, weighing just under 700 pounds, has garnered a great deal of attention statewide.
Love ’em or hate ’em, sharks do get people excited.
It has not been that long since it became a conscious reality that great whites were in the southern Atlantic. In November 2011 a great white, estimated to be 18 feet long circled on the surface again and again around a local boat out fishing. The profanity-laced footage was posted online and generated news stories with high viewing numbers.
When Ocearch.org went live with its shark tracker website, allowing people and school classrooms to log on and follow the location of their favorite shark, first one then a second great white shark, which spend a good deal of time hugging the southern United States coastline, became widely known. The first, Mary Lee, tagged off Cape Cod in September 2012, measured 16 feet, and weighed in at 3,456 pounds. Mary Lee’s tracking device often records her off the Cape Fear River and New Hanover County beaches.
Then Katherine was tagged off Cape Cod 11 months later at 14 feet, and weighing 2,300 pounds. Both sharks have gained star status, with Facebook and Twitter accounts.
When a great white shark was reported having washed up dead, my first thought was, I hope it is not Mary Lee. Then, I thought the same about Katherine, but, looking at our photos it was not an animal wearing a visible tracking devise.
How is it we humans can have affection for a fish that would gladly bite us, given half the chance?
On Friday December 4, Mary Lee surfaced and pinged just south of the North Carolina/Virginia border. Katherine pinged on Wednesday off Hallifax, Nova Scotia. Mary Lee loops a big circle from about the northern U.S. border out to Bermuda and south to Florida, and hugs the coast line; Katherine goes far further north. Katherine also spends a great deal of time hugging the southern U.S coast line.
Both sharks have pinged inside the Outer Banks on Pamlico Sound, all the way to the mouth of the Pamlico River, opposite Swan Quarter. Katherine pinged January 10, 2015, inside the banks opposite Cedar Island on the Cape Lookout National Seashore. This apex predator also ventured down around Florida into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico last May through early July.
While her tracking indicates a preference for the waters off the mouth of the Cape Fear River off Bald Head Island, Mary Lee has pinged inside the Ocracoke Inlet and on the sound on the lee side of Ocracoke Island. She has pinged further up the Albemarle Sound than one might imagine. Her treks hugging the Eastern Coast go no further south than about Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, but do go much further south out in deep water running along the same longitudes as the Bahamas then up to Bermuda and on north.
Tagging and satellite tracking the sharks has made us more familiar with the fearsome creature forever typecast in the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie “Jaws,” with its unforgettable E and F, da-dum bass notes, forever immortalized as cueing in imminent and terrible danger. Three sequels followed.
It was perhaps this familiarization that prompted beachgoers on Monday to pose for photos then post on social media, holding the dead predator’s nose in the air to reveal its trademark rows of teeth. At least one straddled the shark. Others ripped teeth from the dead creature as perhaps some kind of grisly, “I touched a great white” trophy. One can assume this required pliers.
It did not hurt the shark, long dead before it washed up. Researchers said cause still unknown after being dissected and studied in a rare opportunity for students and graduate students at the UNCW marine biology labs in the final week of school.
Anything to do with sharks draws a great deal of attention. This dead great white — with its bloody jaws — photographed beside the iconic Crystal Pier was no exception.
The manner in which some posed for pictures and posted them on social media was deemed unseemly by a few, unkind and pretty inappropriate by many.
Lumina News took criticism on Facebook for posting pictures of people taking pictures of others sitting atop the shark, and holding up its nose to show the bloody mouth. But we don’t make the news; we just report it, sad or glad — the good, bad and often the ugly.
The self-glorification picture posting on social media phenomenon does seem to have passed the point of good taste.
