Know About The Big White Shark Who Really Get Into The Long Island’ Sound

It is possible that a great white shark has entered Long Island Sound. This is a first step for a great white shark in that body of water that has not been there at all.

Cabot, a male shark 9 feet 8 inches long (almost 3 meters), appeared to appear off the coast of Greenwich, Connecticut, on Monday morning (May 20). When the dorsal fin of a marked shark breaks the surface of the water, nearby satellites "ping" the location of who is tracking the fish. In the case of Cabot, the nonprofit organization Ocearch got the ping, suggesting that the shark was on Long Island Sound.

The problem with these crawlers is that they do not give an exact location. "There's a big error bar to the right or left of whatever location you're given," said George Burgess, marine biologist and director emeritus of the Florida Shark Research Program at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "And that error bar can be the difference between one side of Long Island and the other."

Indeed, less than a day later, Cabot's tracker pinged the south coast of Long Island, outside the sound, which Ocearch posted on his Facebook page. That would mean that Cabot had traveled almost 200 miles (320 kilometers) in just half a day, The New York Times reported.

"Either it was in the sound or it was never in the sound," Ocearch spokesman John Kanaly said, according to The Times. "We have calculated that I would not have had time to travel the whole island and come back."

Long Island Sound is a tidal estuary connected to the Atlantic Ocean and located between Connecticut (to the north) and Long Island (to the south). Burgess, a shark scientist, said he does not remember any record of a great white shark in that body of water. And possibly for good reason: the main prey of the shark, seals, has not been seen in sound in abundance since before the 1960s, Burgess said.

"I suspect that when the seals disappeared from Long Island Sound, so did their predator, the great white shark," he concluded.

Other big sharks, most of which prefer warm water come to Long Island through the Gulf Stream. This "river" of warm waters in the sea travels from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean in the southern tip of Florida and then to the east coast to the north of Newfoundland. But that warm current does not flow into the sound of Long Island.

The great white shark is a migratory animal who travels south to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico and north to Newfoundland. Then, maybe Cabot was moving toward New England for the summer, but instead of turning slightly right in New York, the shark turned left, essentially making a "wrong turn," Burgess speculated.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.livescience.com/65540-why-great-white-shark-long-island-sound.html