Relax, It’s Safe to Go Back In the Water

As swimming season gets under way and East Hampton sees an influx of visitors eager to enjoy the beaches, one website to bookmark and click on often might be the one run by OCEARCH, a nonprofit research group that focuses on great white sharks and other species of top ocean predators. 

Its online global shark tracker reports in real time the whereabouts of more than 100 sharks in waters all over the globe, including Mary Lee, a great white that was off the south shore of Long Island earlier in May, and several other sharks tagged last summer during the Shark’s Eye Tournament, a catch-and-release tournament in Montauk.

Scientists work with the group, which captures sharks from its boat and maneuvers them onto a lift to sample and tag them to amass data on their movements, biology, and health. The animals are kept in captivity for all of 15 minutes and then released, with no apparent negative effect, the researchers say.

Bonac, a blue shark weighing 216 pounds, was captured by Joe Gaviola and the crew of the Free Nicky and named by the kids at the Amagansett School. A mature male, 9 feet, 8 inches long, he has traveled 2,746 miles since last summer, as of early in the week. Bonac has kept a relatively local track, spending time in the offshore waters south and east of Montauk and never venturing farther south than around Virginia.

Chris Nic, an immature, six-foot-long female mako shark also tagged in Montauk last July after being caught by Mr. Gaviola and crew, has zigzagged 622 miles since then.

Her name comes from those of Mr. Gaviola’s two daughters, Christine and Nicole. According to her satellite path, she’s something of a New York-New Jersey girl, swimming back and forth from just off Montauk to off Atlantic City, and east and west along that track.

Up-to-the-minute information on both, along with Mary Lee and the other sharks, can be found at OCEARCH.org. Shark watchers can also follow Twitter at @MaryLeeShark, an unofficial account set up by a fan.

When a great white ate and spat out a midnight skinny-dipper off the fictional Amity Island in the 1975 movie “Jaws,” just before the Fourth of July holiday, the town’s mayor tried to keep the incident under wraps, not wanting to scare tourists away.

This week, though no particular shark is in sight, East HamptonTown Supervisor Larry Cantwell was nevertheless unconcerned.

“There are sharks off Long Island,” he said. “Of various types. So many different sharks in our waters here.”

Mary Lee, he said, “could easily be off our coast. The truth is, we have sharks in our waters frequently. I don’t think that you can overreact to the fact that there are sharks in the ocean. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody.”

“We have lifeguards. They’re trained. They’re always vigilant,” he said, and from their vantage point on lifeguard chairs above the beach, would be able to spot fins among the swimmers.

“If you’re concerned about sharks, then swim in a protected area,” Mr. Cantwell said. A lifelong resident here, he said he could not recall a shark attack incident in East Hampton waters.

At 16 feet and 3,456 pounds when she was tagged almost three years ago, Mary Lee is a pussycat compared to the 25-foot, three-ton monster that reared its toothy mouth in “Jaws,” terrorizing swimmers during Amity Island’s holiday weekend.

Still, the idea of a great white shark lurking in East End waters might put a crimp in some weekenders’ beach plans.

When the satellite tracker placed Mary Lee off the western Long Island coast several weeks ago — at one point she cruised as far east as Suffolk’s Robert Moses State Park, though offshore — media outlets questioned whether there was a system in place to warn municipal officials if the shark came near.

Not really, Ed Michels, East Hampton Town’s chief Marine Patrol officer, said Tuesday. But, he pointed out, unlike in the movies, where shark hunters set out in a too-small boat to dispatch Amity Harbor’s hungry great white, “we can’t do anything,” Mr. Michels said. The great white and numerous other sharks are deemed endangered and protected species.

In his 23 years in East Hampton, Mr. Michels said, “we’ve had no attacks; we’ve had no close encounters.”

And yet, like Mr. Cantwell he recognized that “they’re out there all the time.” Most times, he said, reports of a shark fin in the water turn out to be a glimpse of the similar-looking, but much more wobbly, dorsal fin of the harmless mola mola, or ocean sunfish, which feeds on jellyfish.

However, Mr. Michels said, if a shark is sighted, the protocol is simple: “Stay out of the water.” Sightings should be reported to a lifeguard, he said, who would call the Marine Patrol. “We’ll monitor the area; we’ll call the Coast Guard. But there’s not much more we can do than that.”

Last summer, Mr. Michels said, numerous sharks, including great whites, were spotted by fishermen in waters as close as a mile or so off Montauk. A three or four-foot-long great white washed up dead on Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett; Mr. Michels handed it over to scientists at Stony Brook Southampton.

Mike Bottini, a longtime lifeguard, swimmer, surfer, and naturalist who leads the Surfrider Foundation’s Eastern Long Island chapter, also said this week that it’s not that sharks don’t share our waters — it’s just that we are unaware they’re there.

Researchers studying gray seals on Canada’s Sable Island, Mr. Bottini said, have found a correlation between the presence of great white sharks and the number of seal pups — especially when the pups are being weaned, taking their first, vulnerable dips.

With seals being  key prey for sharks, and “a guy in a wetsuit, or on a board” similar in shape to them when seen from the water below, “my intriguing thing is,” Mr. Bottini said, “why aren’t there more shark attacks?” In fact, the number of seals seen here has been increasing in recent years.

He theorized that the predators’ keen sense of smell might help them tell the difference between a human and a seal.

Should the OCEARCH trackers note a dangerous shark in inshore waters, they are likely to alert local officials. That’s what happened, Mr. Bottini said, when Mary Lee was pinpointed only 200 yards off the beach in Jacksonville, Fla. Lifeguards got a call to keep people away.

According to recent research cited on the OCEARCH site, white sharks can live more than 70 years in the North Atlantic.

Mary Lee was tagged off Cape Cod in September 2012. Since then, she has traveled more than 20,000 miles. The OCEARCH website shows her track veering as far north as Massachusetts, where she crossed the edge of the Continental Shelf in the deep sea, out to Bermuda, and south to Florida, where she was tracked both far off the coast and inshore.

At 2:09 p.m. on Tuesday, she was southeast of Chincoteague Island in Virginia, not nearly as far out into the Atlantic as she has been, but far enough offshore not to be inciting a chorus of the menacing notes from the theme of “Jaws.”