An alarming increase of sharks in the East Coast waters has beachgoers and fishermen on edge.
The Long Island Sound – which borders New York City, Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut – is home to five shark species: the spiny dogfish, the smooth dogfish, the dusky shark, the brown shark and the sand tiger shark.
But larger sharks can make their way into the relatively calm waters and have been doing so at an increased rate.
In 2022, at least six people were bitten or injured by sharks at New York beaches, and in 2019, a great white was reported off the shore of Greenwich, Connecticut.
‘They can be relatively close to shore, depending on where they’re feeding and what they’re feeding on for certain times of year,’ fisheries biologist Jon Vander Werff told the Hartford Courant.
‘I don’t want to say they’re right off shore like on the beach lines, but if someone was to be fishing and catch a fish, those larger [sharks] are usually the ones that will go after a fish,’ he said. ‘They’re not right off shore of the beaches, but they can come in pretty close to shore.’
He noted that the conditions in the Sound are becoming ideal for such sharks.
‘The water quality is there for them and the ecosystem has been rebounding from years’ past, where there hasn’t been a lot of sharks,’ he told the Hartford Courant.
‘Some people might not think it’s a good. But as a fisheries biologist, I look at this as an excellent thing because the ecosystem is rebounding, and now there’s enough resources for the sharks to be surviving in [the] Long Island Sound.’
‘They’re the apex predator, so they’re at the top of the food chain,’ he added. ‘They need a lot of resources to keep themselves going.’
There is now ample prey for the sharks to eat in the Sound as a result of conservation efforts to clean up rivers that flow into the ocean.
‘Seeing sharks in our local ecosystem is extremely important, and it’s a sign that the environment around us is healthy,’ Chris Paparo, a shark expert at Stony Brook University in Long Island said in a series of Twitter videos.
David Molnar, of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, also attributed the rise in shark sightings to more pups as sand bar sharks become more common.
‘Some of it’s their biology,’ he said.
‘It takes between one and three years to have pups, and they only have a couple of pups when they do.
‘We only see them in the summertime. They’re here now, they’re popping.’
‘We’ve had young pups caught there by accident by fishermen, and they tend to follow wherever the bait,’ he noted.
‘So right now, there’s a lot of bunker in Milford, New Haven. So I’m sure there are sharks out there feeding on them.’
Molnar added that smooth dog fish are also present in the Long Island Sound, but will move out when the waters cool in the fall and winter.
But professors Oliver Shipley and Michael Frisk at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook told DailyMail.com said they can’t conclusively say there is one specific reason why the sharks are swimming so close to shore.
‘This is not a cut-and-dry cause-and-effect scenario,’ Shipley said.
‘This is something that’s extremely complex and we have to be really careful about attributing single things, like pollution, to why we may see more of certain animals in certain areas than we did before.’
Still, experts say the odds of getting bitten remain low, with seasoned diver John Langlois, the owner of Enfield Scuba and Water Sports, putting them at 264million to one.
‘When you look at how many, they get a bad reputation, because as soon as somebody gets bit, it sounds like hundreds of people are getting bit, but they’re not,’ he told the Courant.
‘And there’s so few bites that what makes them so bad, of course, is the publicity.’
But if provoked ‘like for example, you’re swimming and you kick one, they might come around [for] an exploratory bite,’ Vander Werff warned.
To avoid any bites, Langlois recommends avoiding areas that drop off to 20 to 30 feet ‘because that would be the sneak attack, where sharks would be below, see something moving and just come straight up to you.
‘Obviously avoid water if you’re bleeding,’ he added. ‘There is an increased risk of shark attack. Sharks can sense tiny molecules of blood from long distances. Especially in brackish or low-visibility water a shiny object can look like a bait fish.
‘So you want to leave your shiny jewelry on the beach blanket.