June 13, 2016 — Ever since the blood-curdling screams of an ill-fated skinny dipper, who met her famous demise in the opening scene of “Jaws,” generations of beach-goers have approached the water with bone-chilling trepidation.
Now, a leading shark research team has said it suspects Long Island might be a breeding ground for great whites and has launched a tagging expedition to be able to determine potential birthing sites.
But the news isn’t reason to panic: Experts agree that swimmers have a greater danger of being killed by a faulty toaster oven — or driving on the Long Island Expressway, for that matter — than being devoured by a shark.
According to OCEARCH Chief Operating Officer Fernanda Ubatuba — OCEARCH is a nonprofit organization dedicated to shark research — if you look at a global shark tracker, five mature female great white sharks have been tagged in the past three to four years, and it seems that “there is certain activity in that region.”
Great white sharks, she said, travel from Florida to Canada, “and you can see their activity sometimes overlaps around Long Island.”
OCEARCH has launched a Kickstarter campaign to tag and research great white sharks in the North Atlantic; that research might help to investigate sample sites and ultimately determine definite breeding sites around Long Island, Ubatuba said.
The team will tag juvenile great whites in New York waters, the campaign site says.
Technology utilized by OCEARCH aims to allow people to see, in real time, “breeding and mating sites for the first time in history. It’s amazing,” she said.