Basking Sharks and Misinformation

A basking shark measuring 24 feet long washed up on a Long Island beach this week. A colleague posted here about this event, a few days ago, erroneously reporting the shark as fifteen feet long and speculating about "How many people has this enormous shark eaten in its lifetime"—a question that deserves both an immediate answer and an exaggerated eyeroll. The answer, of course, is dead simple: that shark has never eaten or attacked any people at all. It doesn't have any teeth, for pity's sake. This sort of ridiculous hysteria has a great deal to do with why so many sharks are in such grave danger from humans, and about ten seconds worth of fact-checking would have made the truth obvious to a second-grader.

The basking shark, though a mature adult may be over 30 feet long, has no real teeth and isn't considered a threat to humans. These sharks are plankton eaters, and the second-largest shark species—whale sharks are the largest. They get their name from their practice of feeding on plankton near the surface, so appearing to bask in the sun. The species is fairly common off the coast of New England.

Scientists have long thought that basking sharks stayed in cooler waters, though this large fish is still largely mysterious—there's a lot more that we don't know, than we do. Recent satellite tracking projects, though, reveal that the basking shark ranges from New England waters, south to the Bahamas, and even further south, across the equator into South American waters.

The shark reportedly died shortly after washing up on the shore. Officials say there will be a necropsy to determine the cause of death. It's fairly common for this species to wash ashore after they've died at sea, but much more rare for them to beach themselves while still alive, though ailing, as this one did.