"We live in a part of the country where, up until now, there was nothing that was going to kill you," said Dennis Minsky, a Cape Cod naturalist who spends his summer out at sea educating the public about whales, and anything else dwelling in the water.īut before the sharks came the gray seals. "Sharks are trying to hunt seals, and now people are in the mix."
"Now, you’ve got a new player - and that new player is human beings," Greg Skomal, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, who has researched white sharks for three decades, said. In some areas, clouds of fish dart frantically beneath the surface as humpback whales open their jacuzzi-sized mouths and engulf them.īut today, there's another dominant species in the water. "From strictly a conservation goal of trying to recover these wild animals and upper-level predators, it's been incredibly successful," said Hayes.Ī truer wilderness, then, has largely returned to the shores of Cape Cod, well beyond just sharks and seals. But, after being protected by the landmark Marine Mammal Protection Act nearly half a century ago, the seals are back, and growing their numbers. Sharks hunt seals, but seal populations were mostly exterminated from New England waters around 150 years ago, Sean Hayes, chief of the protected species branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said in an interview. SEE ALSO: Glowing snow is falling thousands of feet under the sea. It's a greater return of the ocean and coastal wilderness: What it was like centuries ago, before salty mariners arrived in droves to fish the plentiful seas before the Pilgrims first stepped foot onto the cape, en route to establishing a colony at Plymouth.Ī Cape Cod beach closes in August 2018 following a shark attack. Yet today, it's not just sharks that have returned to Cape Cod. "Sharks were something that happened in Australia." We never worried about sharks," said Dockray. The tragedy was first shark attack fatality in Cape Cod since 1936, and it came a month after a shark latched onto the thigh of a New York neurologist, who was fortunately dragged ashore by group of beachgoers, and lived to tell a lurid tale.ĭecades ago, however, no one ever saw sharks in Cape Cod, New England's legendary hooked-shaped summer destination. The next afternoon, a shark - suspected to be a great white - sunk its teeth into 26-year-old boogie-boarder Arthur Medici. "I actually thought, 'Aren't they worried?'" Dockray, whose family has owned a house on the cape for 60 years, said in an interview. The waves were mighty that day, so she went to watch the surf pound the shore.
14, Wendy Dockray strolled down to Newcomb Hollow Beach, on the shore of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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