If you visited the Ocearch marine animal tracker in the last week, you might have noticed that the coastline of North America was being attacked by white sharks.
It turns out the amalgam of elasmobranches is nothing to worry about. Climate change could be playing a longer term role in the shark migration season along the coast.
The headlines come up when someone goes on a shark tracker and just has a display of all the tags. You would have expected more sharks. We have the technology to actually see them.
Eighty-three tagged white sharks are currently seeing out their migration from the cooler waters off Massachusetts and Canada to the warmer waters of North Carolina and Florida. The animals are spread along the coast because they head out at different times. Climate change is affecting those migrations as the animals will head out of the northern waters later in the year than normal, as the water temperatures stay balmier for longer.
The sharks are still transiting, which is one of the reasons for the big spread. There are some sharks that could have made it all the way down to Florida, and then there are the sharks that are just now getting around to leaving Nova Scotia waters.
Warmer temperatures will cause sharks to stay closer to shore, which can increase the number of shark encounters. It is extremely rare for sharks to attack humans, but the animals are close and so they are more likely to see it.
The number of sharks on the tracker is a testament to the success of the white shark campaign. An animal that was once demonized is no longer being hounded. The shark populations are making a comeback after being overfished. It seems like there is more sharks because a generation of fishermen have grown up with less sharks, but it is almost like the system is going back to normal.
The world recovering shark populations are a very different one than they were before. Climate change is changing the color of the ocean and reducing the amount of oxygen in the water.
As waters heat up, sharks have found a way to spend more time further north. Some species are being put under pressure by rising temperatures, to say nothing of the impacts of industrial fishing. Over the past 50 years, 70% of sharks have been wiped out. Even if the current shark migration is normal, we shouldn't be surprised if the sharks decide to rise up one day.
Two bull sharks are swimming up the Mississippi River.
