A white shark tore into a seal in shallow water off Nantucket's Great Point Sunday, and two onlookers happened to catch the entire bloody encounter on video. The footage shows the shark's dorsal and tail fins slicing through a pool of blood, with another seal visible on the beach nearby and the shoreline plainly in view the whole time.
Carrie Drayton and Tyler O'Brien captured the attack and sent the video to Boston 25 News, which identified the animal as a white shark based on guidance from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Per that same guidance, white shark activity around Nantucket and Cape Cod typically peaks in September and October, putting Sunday's sighting squarely in the season when these predators are most active close to shore.
Shark Activity at Great Point
Great Point sits inside the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, where sharks have been documented preying on gray seals. The area was long assumed to be exclusive white shark territory until drone footage analyzed in 2023 confirmed that dusky sharks were hunting there too, according to a study covered by WSHU. Hoodline previously reported on that research in a piece on how dusky sharks returned to these waters after decades away.
Seals gather around remote beaches like Great Point, and white sharks have been documented hunting in shallow water near the shoreline; dusky sharks have also been documented in the area. The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has found that white sharks off Cape Cod and Nantucket spend 47% of their time in water that shallow, stalking seals near public beaches where the action is easy to witness from land.
Why the Sharks Keep Coming Back
The underlying reason predators keep showing up so close to shore traces back to a conservation success story. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 protected gray seals as their population recovered. Research from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has documented white sharks in Cape Cod and Islands waters, making the region a recognized white shark aggregation site in the western North Atlantic, according to a study published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
During peak shark season, Cape Cod gray seals tended to remain near shore during the day and venture offshore at night.
Safety Measures Remain in Place
Great Point's remote, barrier-beach setting has prompted serious precautions before. In July 2023, the Trustees of Reservations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enacted an indefinite swimming closure past mile marker 5 at the refuge after multiple witnessed shark attacks on seals close to shore, as reported by CBS Boston. Officials cited the difficulty of emergency medical transport from such an isolated stretch of coastline in justifying the closure.
Massachusetts recorded a fatal white-shark attack that was the state's first since 1936, according to CAI.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy's crowdsourced Sharktivity app maps sightings, with submissions verified by New England Aquarium scientists before they appear on the map. White sharks remain a state-designated prohibited species in Massachusetts waters, meaning attracting or capturing them without a permit is against the law.
Sunday's Great Point encounter is the latest in a string of nearshore predations documented around Nantucket and Cape Cod this year, following a hooked-and-released great white off Nantucket's south shore in June.
