At first, the story was just too good to ignore. Cabot, a ten-foot-long great white shark, had been tracked swimming in Long Island Sound off Greenwich, Connecticut. OCEARCH, the organization that tracks marine life and that had tagged Cabot off Nova Scotia in October, said that Cabot’s tracker had pinged there, and that it was the first time they had traced a shark to the Sound.
OCEARCH also created a Twitter account for Cabot, a “sub-adult’ weighing about 533 pounds. “Hello Greenwich,” Cabot Tweeted. “How are you today?”
The media frenzy was immediate, and worldwide. The Daily Mail in London ran a headline: “Great White Shark Pings in Long Island Sound for the First Time EVER – and It’s More than 500 pounds and Nearly 10 Feet Long!”
Then things calmed down. Just 12 hours later, OCEARCH said that Cabot had pinged off the south shore of Long Island. That was too far (about 200 miles) for even Cabot. “He either was in the sound or he never was in the sound,” said John Kanaly, an OCEARCH spokesman. “We have calculated that he wouldn’t have had time to go all the way around the island and back.” The discrepancy was probably caused by Cabot’s tracker.
In any event, Cabot, named after John Cabot, the explorer, is a long-distance swimmer. OCEARCH is positive he had already roamed down to the Gulf Coast of Florida and back, swimming some 4,000 miles. We’ll just have to stand by to see where he pings – with certainty – next.
Meanwhile, OCEARCH is keeping track of four other great whites swimming off the Carolinas. One, Luna, is 15-feet long and weighs 2,137 pounds. Earlier this week she was swimming 90 miles southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. Another great white, Caroline, was tracked close to shore off Edisto Beach, South Carolina; Caroline is 12-feet, 9-inches long. Read more:
