Great white sharks swim by Jersey Shore; meet the man who pioneered tagging them here
Seven-minute read
Dan Radel- Great white sharks are migrating north along the Atlantic Coast from their wintering grounds.
- Researcher Jack Casey's work in the 1960s revealed large shark populations off the Jersey Shore, including a great white shark nursery.
- Casey pioneered shark tagging programs, leading to significant advancements in understanding shark behavior and migration patterns.
Like clockwork set in motion long ago, the great white sharks are on the move up the Atlantic Coast from their wintering grounds in the waters off the Southeastern United Sates.
Research has shown that most are headed for the seal populations on the rocky coasts of New England and Canada, where they will fill their bellies over a summer of gorging on their fat.
Just last week, on April 25 and 26, a 500-pound sub-adult great white shark male nicknamed Danny "pinged" more than a dozen times as it skirted the New Jersey coast. It was carrying a satellite tag on its dorsal fin placed there this winter by the nonprofit group OCEARCH, which captured Danny near the boundary of Florida and Georgia.
The apex predator, still not quite mature and honing its hunting skills, would have likely eluded detection had it not been for the tag.
A "ping" occurs when the electronic global positioning system tag on the shark's dorsal fin, called a Smart Position and Temperature Tag, or SPOT tag, is above the surface long enough for the shark's location to be picked up by satellite. OCEARCH then shares that information with the public via its Global Shark Tracker app.
Danny followed on the heals of another great white shark, Mahone, this one a full-fledged adult shark that OCEARCH has been tracking for five years, and another predatory shark, a 400-pound tiger shark dubbed Kando. Both took a route that was many miles east of the submarine canyons on the continental slope.
Modern-day shark taggers like the nonprofit OCEARCH or the Massachusetts-based Atlantic White Shark Conservatory, which have use the latest technology such as acoustic tags, SPOT tags and crowd-sourcing sightings from an engaged public, have stripped away some of the elusiveness of one of the ocean's most prolific and sometimes terrifying predators.
That was not always the case. Not long ago, great white sharks remained cloaked in mystery. The rare shark attack on people helped fuel their position atop human fears as they offered a stark reminder of what they are capable of if they set their powerful jaws on human flesh and bone.
The Jersey Shore was the site of two shark panics. The most publicized occurred over a span of 12 days in July 1916, when four swimmers were mauled to death while a fifth victim had the flesh of his left leg stripped off but survived to tell the tale. Though it has never been 100% proven, a great white shark is believed to be the culprit.
Then, history seemed to be repeating itself in August 1960 when three swimmers were attacked in the span of nine days. The first occurred in knee-deep water at Sea Girt on Aug. 21. A 24-year-old man was severely bit on his lower left leg. Ten days later surgeons had to amputate this leg. The next day, Aug. 22, a 14-year-old boy had his knee ripped to the bone in an attack in the waters of Seaside Park. Lastly, a 25-year old nearly lost life and limb when a shark grabbed his left leg while he was swimming three miles off of Ocean City.
Shark pioneer
Enter Jack Casey, a young man from New England who was recently discharged from the Navy and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts. In 1960, Casey had just arrived on the scene at the newly built U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife laboratory at Sandy Hook.
At the time the menhaden fishery was very active at the Jersey Shore, with purse seine boats out of Belford in Middletown rounding up the hand-size bait fish in nets that cinch closed like a pocket book.
The fishery, which operated very close to shore, was taking some heat from the recent bout of shark attacks. The fishermen then marched to the lab and offered them a boat, a crew and money to cover expenses if they would just send some scientists out to "do something on sharks," Casey said.
"They were concerned and they wanted people to know they were doing something," Casey said in a telephone interview in March with the Asbury Park Press from his home in Rhode Island.
Casey is now in his 90s, but remembers candidly what they saw in their first study. Using new, experimental longline fishing techniques introduced by Japanese fishermen in the Gulf, Casey had the crew set out monofilament fishing lines with 100 hooks suspended by floats on the surface every 10 miles from Jones Inlet in New York to Cape Henlopen Delaware, "just to see what was there."
What they discovered was a large, population of various shark species was thriving off the coast.
"We caught 300 sharks, including some tigers and sandbars, some big dusky and mako and a half-dozen (great) white sharks," Casey recalled. "They were there, they were probably always there."
Casey then tried the entrance to New York Harbor. He pulled his longline just around the corner of Sandy Hook close to the Scotland Lightship, which marked the spot of wreck of the Scotland, a 430-foot steamer that sunk on a shoal in 22 feet of water following a collision with another vessel.
They caught 50 sharks instantly. Most of them were big tiger sharks and dusky, Casey said. They were there eating garbage that boats dumped overboard. In the belly of one tiger shark they found pounds of bacon.
His next set though, is the one that became a breakthrough in the armor of the great white shark's mystique. He found one of their nurseries. Casey's crew ran a longline set 100 yards off of the beach at Sandy Hook. Soon it came alive as sharks were pulling at it below. When they hauled it in, they counted 12 juvenile great white sharks, none bigger than five feet.
"They were laying in their feeding on the heads of bluefish that the charter boats were throwing overboard as they cleaned fish on their way into dock," Casey said.
When Casey started publishing his findings, he suddenly found himself inundated with letters from sportfishermen. Casey said they weren't worried about sharks; they wanted to know where they could go to catch the sharks and how they could help with the research.
"That was the genesis of the shark-tagging program," Casey said.
Five-dollar rewards and 'shark tagger' hats
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Casey realized just how much information could be obtained by working with sport and commercial fishermen, and so he initiated the Cooperative Shark Tagging Program in 1962 with fewer than 100 volunteer fishermen who were eager to help science. Since then, thousands of fishermen have stepped up to join forces with NOAA Fisheries to tag sharks all over the Atlantic.
Casey said these early tags were stainless steal darts with a monofilament trailer which held a written message in five languages. The message asked whoever recaptured the shark to send the tag to the lab with information about where and when the shark was landed and any other additional information they could provide such as water temperature, depth and fishing method.
"We offered $5 rewards for the return of the tags. But people didn't want the money. So we offered them a hat that said "Shark Tagger," Casey said. "They liked the hat better so we gave a lot of those away to the fishermen."
Part of Casey's legacy is that fishermen have tagged over 300,000 sharks in the program he began, with more than 18,000 being recaptured and their tags recovered. Efforts made by Casey and the late Frank Carey, who was a pioneer in radio tags on bluefin tuna during his time at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, paved the way for today's taggers.
"Back then we couldn't understand how tuna could dive so deep and not go into shock. The radio tags let us monitor the fish from the boat. We learned a lot about their physiology that way. It's common knowledge now that they can regulate their own body temperature," Casey said.
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 at dradel@gannettnj.com.