Great white shark sightings up on East and West Coasts: What are they after? (+video)

All this said, there are several reasons why the human/shark interface is making the news more in recent weeks than in previous beachgoing seasons:

• More and more people are visiting beaches and venturing further from shore than in the past, using kayaks, surfboards, and windboards.

• Shark encounters are much more easily and commonly captured as images and videos on cell phones, which make their way to the Internet via YouTube and to local broadcast news shows hungry for summer features.

• And the summer season is precisely when migrating sharks come to land after months at sea, so sightings are much more common.

“There is most definitely a seasonal pattern to this,” says Sal Jorgensen, senior researcher at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. “This increased concern could be an uptick in sightings because more people are there to see them.” He says the sharks stay about 1,000 miles offshore in an area dubbed, affectionately, the “white shark café” for about six months a year and then beeline straight for the Baja Peninsula. The annual migration takes about three weeks of swimming at the high speed of about 50 miles per day.

“We know because they swim that fast and in a straight line, that they haven’t had time to hunt to eat a lot and thus are very hungry when they arrive,” he says.

But he adds that the recent incident at Pleasure Point was mischaracterized as an attack: A man fishing from his kayak in about 40 feet of water just outside a kelp bed was knocked from the kayak by the shark's bump to the vessel’s backside.

“I looked at the pictures of bite marks on the kayak and it was merely what a dog might do to some object when curious about it – nip at it with the only means it has,” says Mr. Jorgensen.

He says probably too much was made in the press about the teeth left in the kayak.

“Kayaks are not edible and so the shark just toyed with it and left,” he says.

He urges beachgoers and swimmers on both coasts to simply remember to just not do something stupid.

“Common sense should prevail when swimming in waters known to be frequented by dangerous sharks,” says George Benz, professor of Marine Biology at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn.  “In the case of the Cape Cod situation ... people should avoid swimming nearby seals. This type of common sense is really no different from a person not getting on an airplane with a broken wing.”

Chris Lowe, a professor of Marine Biology at California State University, Long Beach, says that while recent fatal shark attacks in Southern California and Mexico have many people concerned about going to the beach again, beachgoers need to put things in perspective.

“These are really, really rare events. While it’s truly unfortunate, I don’t really think people have much to worry about. The chances of someone being bitten by a shark in Southern California are so small that in many ways, it’s an unrealistic worry."

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