“On June 25, at approximately 4:15 p.m., a 20-year-old female
park visitor was waist deep in the surf at the Central Mall beachfront at Jones
Beach State Park when she reported being bitten by unknown marine wildlife.”
The announcement mentioned that the bites resulted in “minor
lacerations” to one foot and leg, described her medical care in fair detail,
and noted that
“The swimmer did not observe what caused her injuries.”
The announcement went on to reveal that swimming resumed at
the beach the following morning, that
“Prior to opening, Park Police and Park staff used drones to
actively search for large schools of fish and other marine life,”
and that lifeguards, watching from shore and from surf boats
and jet skis, were also patrolling the waters.
Finally, near the bottom of the announcement, the Parks
office conceded that
“[The Department of Environmental Conservation] coordinated with
experts to assess what species may have caused these injuries. DEC biologists reviewed situational
information provided by subjects at the scene, as well as photos of the injury,
and were able to rule out several species.
However, without direct observation of the animal that caused the bites
a full expert consensus was not reached.
DEC concludes this incident most likely involved a juvenile sand tiger
shark (Carcharias taurus).”
Silly season has returned to Long Island’s South Shore. It even came a little early this year.
There’s just something about sharks that seems to make it
happen.
But
the pace picked up in 2022, when a record eight individuals had unplanned,
toothy encounters, and another five got themselves nipped in 2023. The sharks and the swimmers managed to keep
out of each other’s space last year, with no interactions reported, but recent
events at Jones Beach suggest that 2025 might prove to be another interesting
year.
In any event, the overreactions have already begun.
The story of the Jones Beach incident was picked up by major
media outlets, ranging from the more-or-less local New York Times to CNN. And because a few minor cuts aren’t really
news, they had to spice it up a bit, with the
Times ranging all the way down to Hilton Head, South Carolina to report
on two more incidents there, and then even farther around the coast to the Gulf
side of Florida, where a girl recently suffered some fairly serious shark
damage to one of her hands while snorkeling.
“’I been here my whole life and never seen a shark in here,’
Alejandro Aranjo told CNN affiliate ABC.
“Aranjo visits Jone Beach with his family, but following
Wednesday’s incident, ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to let them go in to be
honest.’”
The plain truth is that whether one sees a shark or not,
they currently are, always have been, and hopefully always will be in the
waters south of Long Island, some swimming off of popular bathing beaches, and
others coming into our sheltered and, in the minds of many unfamiliar with the
coast, supposedly shark-free bays.
Sand tigers are a fearsome looking fish, with snaggletoothed jaws that seem made for causing mayhem. They’re a standby in coastal aquariums, where a combination of their menacing appearance, impressive size (they can often reach a length of eight feet, with a few large individuals making it to a little over ten), and relatively lethargic lifestyle makes them well-suited to life in the shark tank.
But despite their
appearance, they tend to be a slower-moving animal that usually stays near the
bottom of bays, estuaries, and the nearshore ocean, preying on fish, cephalopods,
and similar animals. However, they will
sometimes rise higher in the water column, particularly around wrecks and other
fixed structures, where they
can gulp air to make it easier to “hover” at mid-depths, and sometimes exhibit
surprising bursts of speed while ripping through a school of small baitfish.
They often feed in cloudy, phytoplankton-dense water, that conceals them from their target baitfish, but also impairs the vision of both
the sharks and anyone who happens to be wading nearby. Thus, people sometimes unknowingly kick or
step on sand tigers while at the beach, leading to a reaction bite, while the sand
tigers sometimes nip someone who inadvertently gets between them and a baitfish. They can also mistake a flashing hand or foot for a fish that they might want to
eat.
So people get bitten, but the bites can hardly be described
as “shark attacks.”
Yet the hype tends to ignore the reality.
A
July 3 article in the Hudson Valley Post declared that
“Shark attack prompts emergency changes at New York beaches,”
and quoted Governor Kathy Hochul, who assured New York
residents that
“We are continuing to strengthen our shark surveillance capabilities
and safety tactics at these beaches to help protect these treasured summertime
traditions. I encourage all beachgoers
to stay safe, stay alert and always follow direction of lifeguards and park
staff.”
The
New York Times advised readers,
“Don’t Let Shark Panic Spoil Your Fourth of July,”
and told them that
“Today we’ll look at how concerned about sharks you should be
if your plans for the long Fourth of July weekend include going to the beach,”
perhaps never realizing, and very possibly not caring, that
if the press—including the Times—didn’t make such a fuss over every
minor bather/shark interaction, people almost certainly wouldn’t be concerned
at all—in fact, they probably never would have even heard about the
incident. I don’t live all that far from
Jones Beach, but never got word of this season’s first nip until I read the Park
Department’s announcement.
Although, taken on balance, the Times piece did a
good job of putting things in perspective.
It included a very accurate assessment of the situation,
provided by John Sparks, a curator in the department of ichthyology at the American
Museum of Natural History, who said,
“I tell people have fun—the threat is minimal. You’re always swimming around sharks. You always have been. My bottom line: You shouldn’t be any more worried than you’ve
ever been.”
The fact that one person, out of the countless thousands who
have visited Long Island’s beaches so far this year, had a shark interaction
doesn’t change the fact that
the odds against running into a shark’s dentures off Long Island are somewhere
around four million to one.
The odds of dying in a car crash on the Meadowbrook or
Wantagh Parkways, on your way to or from the beach, are quite a bit more daunting, but beachgoers
haven’t stopped driving. They haven’t
even slowed down.
The Times article provided some tips for making an
interaction even less likely, such as not swimming around schools of baitfish
that sharks might choose to eat, staying out of the water during low-light
hours when sharks are more active, and staying out of murky water, noting that
the water was, in fact, murky at the Jones Beach bite site.
It also reassured readers that the state has increased its
total of shark-search drones from 22 to 28 this year, while increasing the
number of trained drone pilots from 40 to 48.
That ought to make beachgoers feel good, although if the water is really
clouded with phytoplankton and surf-roiled sand, the odds of those drones
spotting a shark making its way along the bottom is not particularly good.
And, as others have noted, there are always sharks making their way along the bottom, top, and middle of the water column. I used to be an active recreational shark fisherman. Now, I’ve taken what I’ve learned in a few decades of shark fishing, and am using it to help researchers at Stony Brook University study our inshore shark population. Fishing not that far offshore, so far this year we've caught blue, common thresher, dusky, sandbar, and shortfin mako sharks; one of the researchers, fishing from another boat and closer to shore, has already caught a couple of spinners. In other seasons, our catch has included white sharks, tigers, and various species of hammerheads.
The fact that we catch those fish offshore doesn’t mean that
they stay there. The researchers implant
each fish with acoustic tags, and those acoustic tags are detected every time
one of the sharks passes by one of the receiver arrays located well within
sight of Long Island’s beaches.
The arrays detect a lot of tagged sharks passing by.
But the people who really understand about inshore sharks
are the surfcasters. Sometimes they catch
them—although targeting so-called “prohibited species” such as sand tigers,
sandbars, duskies, and whites is illegal—but even when they aren't catching any sharks, surfcasters are acutely aware that they’re in the sharks’ world.
When chasing striped bass, surfcasters regularly go out in
the dark of the night, often wearing wetsuits that make it easier for them to
swim out to a rock or distant sandbar, from which they then cast their baits and lures (and, coincidentally, make them closely resemble a struggling seal).
Sometimes, they hook a bass or a bluefish, feel the fish’s
struggles intensify for a moment or two, then go quiet, only to reel in the
fish’s head and a few scraps of body.
Other times, when they’re thoughtless enough to hang their
catch from a stringer attached to their belt, they find themselves suddenly
being pulled off a rock or a bar as a shark goes after their fish.
And one time, a friend told me about a trip that he made on
a dark, moonless night, somewhere off Montauk. He was standing on a rock, casting live eels
into the surf, when he felt a piece of driftwood bump into his leg. He pushed it away, but a while later, it hit
him again, and he again shoved it into the waves. The third time it happened, my friend
reluctantly snapped on a light, and found a four-foot sandbar shark taking
covetous glances at his eel pouch.
Such stories aren’t particularly rare.
Yet, as long as I’ve lived on Long Island—and that’s we’ll
over forty years—I’ve never heard of a surfcaster being intentionally gnawed by
a shark, even though they’re often handling bait, and are in waters that sharks
often frequent.
Because the bottom line is that, even for them, the risk is not high.
It’s hard to say whether the June 25 incident will stand
alone, or whether similar episodes will follow; recently, July has been the “hot”
month so they very well may. But what we can be sure of is
that if another such incident occurs, it will be blasted across TV and radio,
and hyped all out of proportion in the press.
Maybe Amity’s
fictional Mayor Vaughn really did get it right in that movie five decades ago:
“…it’s all psychological.
You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’
You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
It’s silly.
But it’s also the summer, and summer is the season for that sort of thing.
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