In the last few weeks Mary Lee, the 3,500 pound, 16-foot great white celebrity of a shark has been all the buzz up and down the east coast. The @MaryLeeShark twitter page now has 67,000 followers and continues to grow.
With the growth of technology and the help of OCEARCH, Mary Lee was tagged almost two years ago, and everytime her fin surfaces scientists get a location ping. But why do we care? As recently as a week and a half ago Mary Lee was pinged a half a mile off of Lavalette beaches. Fortunately for ocean goers a day later she was pinged all the way up by Long Island.
Should NJ swimmers be worried? According to Dr. Gelsleichter from PIX11 news, “I does not believe there is any reason to worry or panic that a great white is swimming off our shores. To back that up – history shows that there has not been a great white shark attack on a human along the East coast since the early 1900s.”