The sharks make a pilgrimage here every year to feed, but a particularly large gray seal population has become an enticing magnet
Gathering by the shores of Monomoy Island near Martha's Vineyard, where much of the movie Jaws was filmed, great white sharks have people on notice in the Northeast.
The sharks make a pilgrimage to this region every year to feed, but a particularly large gray seal population has become an enticing magnet for the large, toothy predators. The presence of the sharks has created a booming tourism business as well as some jitters in the area.
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"Gray seals have a lot of blubber and meat, so they are a high efficiency preferred menu item of great white sharks," New England Aquarium spokesperson Tony LaCasse told Discovery News. "Somehow the word is out in the great white world that this is the place to be."
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He added, "Humans are not on their menu because we are a completely inefficient meal, since great white sharks are looking for maximum calories per kill."
Federal protection of marine mammals has been in place since 1972, and has led to the recovery of gray seals in the area, which are larger and fattier than Harbor seals that are in the waters off of Cape Cod. LaCasse suspects it took this long for gray seals to build up their population.