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(Trends Wide) — As spring takes over the beaches of the Outer Banks, in North Carolina, it is possible to find an aquatic friend that was sighted off the coast: it is a great white shark named Breton.
Breton is one of dozens of sharks being tracked by OCEARCH, a nonprofit marine research group that provides open-source data on shark migration.
This Saturday, Breton’s tracker pinged near Pamlico Sound in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The adult male shark is nearly four meters long and weighs around 680 kilograms, OCEARCH reported.
OCEARCH first detected Breton near Nova Scotia in September 2020 with an electronic tracker, which beeps each time it surfaces.
Like other Atlantic great white sharks, it appears to be currently making its annual migration from the Florida Keys north to Canada. OCEARCH previously told Trends Wide that the sharks spend their summers in the “very rich feeding grounds” in the eastern US and Canada before returning south again for the winter.
Breton was the first shark tagged during OCEARCH’s 2020 Nova Scotia expedition, according to its website. It got its name from the “wonderful people of Cape Breton,” the organization says.
And Breton has company: Several other great white sharks being tracked by OCEARCH have also washed up on the North Carolina coast. Simon and Jekyll, both 8-foot-long male great white sharks, were spotted near Pamlico Sound on Saturday.
Great white sharks are marked as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Most predators face population declines due to overfishing of their prey, as well as bycatch by fishermen.
