Local shark researchers are investigating what killed a younger nice white shark that washed up on a Cape Cod seashore.
The juvenile male shark was discovered lifeless on Sandy Neck Beach in Barnstable on the Fourth of July. Then on Tuesday, researchers carried out a necropsy of the shark that washed ashore from Cape Cod Bay.
So far, there’s no clear signal of what killed the younger shark.
“There were no obvious signs of trauma,” John Chisholm, a Massachusetts-based shark professional who’s with the New England Aquarium, informed the Herald.
“Sometimes you can tell if there was an interaction with fishing gear, and you can find marks on the body to indicate what killed it,” added Chisholm, who can be an area citizen science coordinator answerable for verifying shark sighting stories made by the general public by way of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s Sharktivity app.
On Sunday, he acquired a report from a beachgoer who noticed a dorsal fin near the seashore. The spotter additionally stated the shark didn’t look nicely. A day later, a shark washed up on the Barnstable seashore.
“Everybody went down to check it out, and to try to determine the cause of death,” stated Chisholm, who runs the “MA Sharks” Twitter account.
The researchers took tissue samples from the shark.
“Thanks to @MassDFG @A_WhiteShark and @GregSkomal for recovering this juvenile white #shark and coordinating with us to necropsy it,” tweeted Michelle Passerotti, a shark biologist in NOAA’s Apex Predators Program.
“We sampled every tissue and will send out for pathology to hopefully find out what caused this mortality,” she added.
A fantastic white shark washing up on a Cape seashore is “rare but not uncommon,” Chisholm stated. A few years in the past, two bigger sharks have been discovered on space seashores.
“This is one of the smaller ones,” Chisholm stated. “It definitely does happen, but it is pretty rare.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”