Great white sharks are definitely making their Cape and Islands presence felt this week through the unofficial kickoff of summer season.
Three nice whites had been noticed feasting on a useless whale off Nantucket on Wednesday, simply days after an awesome white was seen devouring a seal off the island.
The apex predators had been chomping on a useless humpback whale that has been floating round Madaket Harbor, on the southwest a part of Nantucket, for a couple of days. NOAA Fisheries on Tuesday reported that Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket had been alerted a few useless humpback whale floating within the harbor.
The triple nice white shark sighting was confirmed on the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s Sharktivity app on Wednesday. It was the second recorded sighting of the season after the vacation weekend’s shark assault of a seal on the northern tip of Nantucket.
Last summer season, a shiver of nice white sharks devoured a whale carcass off Provincetown. Shark researchers ended up tagging 5 of the eight nice whites that had been feasting on the useless humpback.
“A dead whale is like the biggest smorgasbord a shark could ever dream of,” Peter Corkeron, main the whale analysis group on the New England Aquarium, instructed the Herald on the time.
Over the final six years, there was an increase in humpback whale “unusual mortality events” alongside the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida.
Massachusetts has had probably the most humpback whale strandings on the East Coast with 33 over the last six years, adopted by New York with 32. Rhode Island has had seven strandings, and Maine has had 5.
Partial or full necropsy exams had been carried out on about half of the whales; about 50% had proof of human interplay — both a ship strike or entanglement.
On Monday, the Marine Animal Entanglement Response group on the Center for Coastal Studies freed a badly entangled humpback whale off Chatham. The whale, named Thumper, was along with her younger calf and had thick rope wrapped 5 instances round her physique, which seemingly hindered her from feeding.
The group spent an hour with the pair utilizing a specifically designed chopping grapple, and had been in a position to sever the wraps of rope. Both Thumper and her calf had been in poor situation — an indication that the mom had seemingly been entangled for months. The prognosis for each whales is now a lot improved.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”