Great white shark Tancook reaches NJ coast as shark migration continues

Dan Radel, Asbury Park Press
·2 min read
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A second OCEARCH-tagged great white shark, this one a 715-pound male dubbed Tancook, has reached the Jersey Shore on its migration journey.

The shark's satellite tag "pinged" at about 11 p.m. Tuesday while it was near Ocean City in a little more than 30-foot water, according to OCEARCH's Global Shark Tracker.

A "ping" occurs when the electronic tag on the shark's dorsal fin is above water long enough for it to send a signal to a satellite.

This is the first time Tancook, which was juvenile just under 10 feet long when it was tagged, is known to have swam the inshore waters of the Jersey Shore. The shark was tagged at midnight on Sept. 22, 2021, after OCEARCH's research team captured the shark near the coast of West Ironbound Island, Nova Scotia.

Tancook, pictured while aboard the OCEARCH research vessel on Sept. 22, 2021, is a tagged great white shark.
Tancook, pictured while aboard the OCEARCH research vessel on Sept. 22, 2021, is a tagged great white shark.

The location is just south of Tancook Island, which researchers named the apex predator after. Tancook means "facing the open sea" to the indigenous Mi'kmaq people of Nova Scotia.

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After being tagged, Tancook took a migration route south that brought it to Cape Cod, before it turned east and headed into the deep submarine canyons. The shark swam as far south as Vero Beach, Florida, reaching that point in late December.

Tancook was off the Pamlico Sound in North Carolina on May 15, before making a bee line to the New Jersey coast where it was as late as Tuesday evening. It is most likely headed back to Canada.

OCEARCH, a nonprofit research group, has been tagging white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean for over a decade in order to collect data on the life-cycle of one of the ocean's apex predators.

Along with the tagging the sharks, OCEARCH takes biological samples, such as blood and tissue, from the sharks before releasing them into the wild.

Tancook is the second OCEARCH-tagged shark to reach the New Jersey coast this spring. The first was Ironbound which arrived in late April but stayed far off the coast near the edge of the Hudson Canyon, about 90 miles from the shore.

See a video of Ironbound being tagged at the top of this story.

When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com. 

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Great white shark Tancook reaches NJ coast on migration route