No, a 500-pound great white shark did not show up on the wrong side of the Outer Banks
UPDATE: Researchers say they do not think a great white shark actually swam into the Albemarle Sound on Nov. 15.
Ocearch founder Chris Fischer said in an interview that the organization received low-quality tracking data from the satellite tag. A new ping from the transmitter the next day showed Cabot off Kitty Hawk, on the outside of the Outer Banks, he told McClatchy news group.
Fischer explained that the satellite trackers send pings with varying resolution or quality and that the organization has to sift through the locations and delete low-quality data. The lower resolution pings can give the wrong location, which is what happened when a 500-lb great white shark appeared to be near the mouth of the Alligator River.
But, he said, “white sharks do come into the sound.” He recalled one shark that “loved the Ocracoke Inlet” and swam in and out of the inlet to the Pamlico Sound several times.
The original story is below.
A great white shark fitted with a satellite tracker just pinged from the North Carolina coast. Great whites are not unusual along the coast, but what’s different this time is the shark showed up on the inside the Outer Banks near the mouth of the Alligator River.
Tracking data from Ocearch, a marine research organization, shows a shark named Cabot appeared in the Albemarle Sound on Wednesday.
Ocearch researchers first tagged Cabot, a 500-pound great white that is almost 10 feet long, in October 2018 in the waters off Nova Scotia, Canada. Since researchers started tracking Cabot, he has traveled from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and back again, the tracking data shows.
Cabot follows a familiar migration route for Atlantic great whites from Canada in the summer and fall to warmer waters off the Southeast and Florida in the winter, according to the organization.
“The Atlantic continental shelf waters off North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the east coast of Florida are a winter hot spot for large white sharks,” Ocearch said.
Big sharks in the Albermarle Sound are not unheard of. The last time Ocearch tracked a big shark inside the Outer Banks was a 300-pound tiger shark that “pinged” in the Currituck Sound near Corolla, North Carolina, in May 2017.
Sharks “ping” when they surface and the satellite tracker sends in their location. Ocearch maps the tracking data on a public site.
The trackers don’t know how Cabot got into the Albemarle Sound Wednesday. The shark pinged in the ocean off Kitty Hawk Tuesday, according to the tracking data.
CORRECTIONS: “Albemarle Sound” and “Corolla” previously were misspelled throughout this article.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 10:40 AM with the headline "No, a 500-pound great white shark did not show up on the wrong side of the Outer Banks."
