A juvenile great white shark that weighs more than 500 pounds and carries a satellite tag “pinged” off Ocean City, New Jersey, early Monday morning.
It was the latest ping from the sharked — nicknamed Penny — since it traveled near the Delaware coastline sometime in the past two weeks after it was tracked off Assateague Island on May 15.
The shark is the latest OCEARCH-tagged great white, or simply white shark, to swim into New Jersey’s coastal waters this spring during the sharks’ annual northern migration. While OCEARCH’s global shark tracker does not pinpoint the exact location, Penny appeared to be close inshore to Ocean City when her tag transmitted at about 6:30 a.m. Monday.
Penny measured 10 feet, 3 inches and weighed 522 pounds when she was tagged by researchers off Ocracoke, North Carolina, on April 23. Since then she has traveled 622 miles.
OCEARCH, a nonprofit research group, has been tagging white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean for more than a decade in order to collect data on the lifecycle of one of the ocean’s apex predators.
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Along with tagging the sharks, OCEARCH takes biological samples, such as blood and tissue, from the sharks before releasing them into the wild. The group says it uses that data to understand things such as genetics, infections in sharks and to develop antibiotics to treat shark bites.
This is the first reported time that Penny has been off the coast of New Jersey. Many of the OCEARCH-tagged white sharks have demonstrated a migratory route that takes them from Maine and Canada in the summer to the southeastern states of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida in the winter.
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Penny is the 92nd white shark OCEARCH has tagged in the western North Atlantic since it began tagging sharks and was the fourth shark tagged this spring. She was named after Salty Penny Canvas, a Morehead City, North Carolina business that trades in marine canvas.
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.
