Why Are Sharks All Over the South Shore These Days?

OK, it's a misleading headline, and I did it on purpose.

Sometimes we headline-generating types try to assume the viewpoint of the common man who doesn't have a job which requires that he think about sharks for long periods of time. It's easier and more practical than having me try to write from the viewpoint of an actual expert who studied Marine Biology and has hours in the field. It also sets up a straw man for me to knock down.

This is important, because my last paying work as a writer where I wasn't my own boss was as a "Fantasy Football Consultant." You'll notice that, when the shark ate up that kid in Jaws, nobody was clamoring for Chief Brody to call in the Fantasy Football Consultant. Keep that in mind as I flesh out my theories for you.

Sharks are not "all over the South Shore," and it's not a case of them just being around "these days." Only the question mark at the end of the headline saves it from being an outright Lie.

Sharks pre-date humans in Massachusetts. The Wampanoags- who, whatever their faults may have been when dealing with the English, were much more environmentally reasonable than the Palefaces- never really developed Swimming as a mass hobby.  There may have been several reasons for that, but a top contender would be "the English hadn't fished Cape Cod Bay to exhaustion yet, and the larger fish stocks drew in both seals and their toothy predators."

Swimming didn't even catch on with Mr. White until a few hundred years ago, and it wasn't feasible to travel from inland to the beaches until the Industrial Revolution brought about trains and so forth. It wasn't long after the English pushed inland from the coast that a majority of people in America bore young who lived and died without even once thinking about a shark. Until the release of Jaws in the 1970s, the only sea-villains in entertainment were Pirates, Leviathans, U-Boats and the mighty White Whale.

Coastal people tended to work the seas, and sharks were just by-catch to them.  While they undoubtedly saw and perhaps even feared sharks, it was only something to worry about if the ship sank or if the Captain made you walk the plank. Remember, most of the time that man has taken to the seas was well before radios, distress calls and search planes. If your ship sank, you died, and you didn't make it back to shore to tell everyone how sharks ate the rest of the crew.

Sharks were in Cape Cod Bay long before 2010. If I remember to put it in, you can see a pic of the big Great White that was caught a few miles off of Duxbury in the 1930s. Two of the three fatal shark attacks in Massachusetts history happened off Scituate and in Boston Harbor. They went down in the 1800s and 1700s, respectively.

In between then and now, a few strange things happened. The waters off of Massachusetts, which were the first ones to be overfished by Europeans, had their fish stocks drop to very low levels. This was felt up the food chain, through the seals and right to Great White Sharks.
Cape Cod had a bounty on seals for a while, and this drove their numbers down markedly. Low seal totals meant that sharks brought their game elsewhere.

This happened as many areas of formerly isolated Massachusetts coastline were brought under development. It also coincided with the emergence of Beaching as the go-to summer activity. People began to develop formerly empty sections of Duxbury, Plymouth and what have you.

Fish stocks were plummeting, and reached all-time lows by the 1990s. The government intervened, catch limits and keeper sizes went into effect for both commercial and recreational fishermen, and fish gradually started coming back to our waters. This brought back the seals, who began showing up in notable numbers on Cape Cod around the turn of the century.

That's generally a good thing, nature-wise. However, it only took a few years for the sharks to figure out where the seals went, and they began arriving off the shores of Cape Cod in numbers that couldn't helped but be noticed.

It didn't take long for the sharks and seals to grow in number to where Suburbanization became necessary. You could see a seal sunning himself on Duxbury Beach in the 1970s, but it was an unusual thing. It became much less unusual after the century turned.

Likewise, only so many sharks can cruise a particular area. Monomoy, the primary seal and shark hangout, soon spread her apex predator bounty to Orleans, Wellfleet and Truro.  Unlike Monomoy, these are towns with people going to the beach. Truro, not Monomoy, caught the first two shark attacks of the modern era.

We know by shark tagging that the Great Whites summer here, and then head to Dixie for the winter.... regular snowbirds, they are. They sort of follow the Gulf Stream back up here every summer.  To a shark moving north along the US coast, Cape Cod is going to be sort of a roadbock. The seals keep them hanging around once they get here. Competition moves them up along the Cape.

Once they hit Provincetown, they have a decision to make. North equals open sea, East equals open sea and West equals the lovely curved shoreline of Cape Cod Bay. For a fish that primarily eats shore-hugging seals, there's really no debate.

Seals and then sharks have rounded the corner and are now occupying Cape Cod Bay. It's ironic, because one of the selling points of South Shore beaches is "no Cape traffic."

It's more of a trickle than a flood, which makes a lie of the "all over the South Shore" part of the headline. You can learn a lot by judging the results found when sharks are tagged. Monomoy, which is sort of the seals' capitol city, had 14000 shark detection buoy pingings last summer. Duxbury and Plymouth combined for about 200.

Granted, Dr. Gregory Skomal (the shark-tagging guy) focuses his efforts out on Monomoy. I don't think he has ever been tagging in Cape Cod Bay. The South Shore does have shark buoys, however, and these buoys show that sharks are coming from Cape Cod to the beaches of the South Shore. Plymouth was the site of the last shark attack in Massachusetts.

Two bad factors ("bad" for people on the South Shore who are afraid of sharks) kick in at this point.

1) There is nothing to stop the sharks and seals from populating Cape Cod Bay

and

2) It's actually a pretty cool place for seals (and the sharks who eat them) to hang out.

Other than carnivore whales and larger Great Whites, the list of creatures willing to f*ck with a Great White Shark is a small one. Not many of these creatures (Orcas and the like) end up in Cape Cod Bay. The only regular inhabitant of Cape Cod Bay who could kill them is a human. They have a free hand in this town, as the former Sheriff of Lago once said.

The South Shore also has long stretches of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited beach. Duxbury Beach is mostly uninhabited. Plymouth has a lot of coastal housing perched on towering sand cliffs, making it hard for those residents to just trot down to the beach. Seals can come ashore on either spot without much concern over human interaction... I mean, it's tough to sun yourself properly when people keep trying to get you to bounce a ball on your nose, yaknowwhati'msayin'?

Both species could easily get to likin' it here... and there's no reason for them to leave.

The South Shore is populated by people who aren't used to sharks being off of their coasts. I am no superhero type at all, but as a child of the 1970s on Duxbury Beach, I would have saw no threat at all in jumping off of a boat where people had been fishing with big bloody mackerel chunks all day and swimming 100 yards to shore. Even in my 30s, I'd have guessed that Smoking would be the one thing that would kill me over a long swim from a boat to shore.

That is no longer the case. If you view summer as 100 days, like Cape Cod does, Plymouth and Duxbury's numbers show that there was a shark off of each beach every day of last summer... and those were only the ones they got tags into off Monomoy. Perhaps only Poseidon, God and Aquaman know how many Great White Sharks are actually in Cape Cod Bay.

While the threat of a shark attack is still minor if not minuscule, the threat is much greater than it was 40 years ago. The risk is little... but little things mean a lot in a game where the loser is Devoured.