But conservatives have also persuaded many to worry about the white shark, even rooting for it. In 2015, dozens of people attempted to rescue a white shark that was stranded on the beaches of Wellfleet, Mass. They dug a ditch to the sea while pouring water on the animal, which was then dragged by a rope into the ocean.
The shark did not survive, said Gregory Skomal, a senior fisheries scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries who was part of the failed rescue. But the moment was incredibly moving, he said.
“That was a very fascinating, great story,” Dr Skomal said. Yet the shark remains polarizing.
“You get both extremes,” Dr. Skomal said. “There are people who say, ‘the only good shark is a dead shark,’ or ‘sharks are like golden retrievers.'”
He added: “Then there are people in the middle, looking for practical solutions, and that’s really hard to do.”
Why do they (very, very rarely) bite people?
No one knows for sure, said Chris Lowe, a professor and director of the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab. Most likely, they missed a human for natural prey, such as a seal, he said, when they felt threatened.
The death of last month’s Maine Swimmer Julie Dimperio Holowach, a 63-year-old former New Yorker, once shocked people to hear about sightings that were further south along the East Coast. But the range of a white shark, which can live to be 70 years old, is large. Atlantic sharks will travel from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico, and white sharks in the Pacific Ocean can travel from Mexico to Alaska.
