11-02-2025
Great white shark spotted off the Myrtle Beach coast. What else is in SC waters this February?
Weighing in at 425 pounds and stretching over 9 feet in length, Anne Bonny isn't the average winter visitor in the Grand Strand, but she's been cruising through the waters off South Carolina since December.
Anne is a great white shark tagged by OCEARCH, a nonprofit dedicated to ocean research that tracks more than 440 sharks, dolphins, seals, swordfish, alligators and turtles.
Named for a famed 18th-century pirate who spent part of her life in the Carolinas, Anne Bonny was tagged as a juvenile in April 2023. She's since made her way up and down the East Coast twice, as far as Newfoundland in the north and Beaufort in the south.
Since crossing into South Carolina waters in late December, Anne Bonny spent Christmas off the coast of Myrtle Beach, then moved south near Georgetown until at least Jan. 9, before pinging off the coast of North Myrtle Beach on Feb. 4.
And she's not alone. Great white sharks are just one of many larger marine animals that enjoy summering off the northeast United States and Canada when waters are warm and food is abundant before returning south for the winter.
These are some of the animals you could be sharing the beach with in the Grand Strand this February.
While Anne and her kind will return north to snack on seals this summer, other sharks in the Myrtle Beach area stay year-round.
Bull sharks, hammerhead sharks and lemon sharks are all common in South Carolina, according to Lowcountry Marine Mammal Network executive director Lauren Rust.
'Sharks don't come to the surface, necessarily, or not very often,' Rust said. 'They don't need to surface to breathe, so they're always there, but you just aren't seeing them as often.'
While sharks might evoke images of big mouths and sharp teeth, it's worth noting that there have been fewer than 120 confirmed unprovoked shark attacks in South Carolina.
Great white sharks tend to stay miles away from shore, and Rust says that, while species residing in South Carolina year-round come farther inland, they're also less deadly.
'If the water is salty, then there's going to be sharks in there. But I don't think there's anything you can do to prevent your chance of getting bit by a shark, other than staying out of the water, but I wouldn't encourage that,' Rust said. 'It's so, so rare, but you are going into their habitat, and they live there and they feed there.'
The 8-to-10-foot pygmy sperm whale, which Rust calls the 'smaller cousin of a large sperm whale,' resides in deep water off the coast of South Carolina. It's the only species that sticks around all year, but plenty of other whales visit in the colder months.
'They come down to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, to give birth over the winter,' Rust said. 'So they're going to be passing our coast over the next couple months, and then they're going to do it again as they head back north.'
Two whale species that venture near enough to shore for beachgoers and boaters to sometimes spot are humpback whales and endangered North Atlantic right whales, Rust said.
Others, including beaked whales, large sperm whales, minke whales and pilot whales pass by farther off the coast.
Bottlenose dolphins are an exciting sight off the Grand Strand coast, and compared to other animals on this list, they're spotted relatively often.
While some pods live in South Carolina waters year-round, Rust says another group travels regionally to Georgia in the colder months and others migrate from farther north.
Dolphin populations in the Myrtle Beach area tend to peak in the late fall, but pods are still visible through the winter.
'They're going to head down the coast where it's a little bit warmer, where the food might be a little bit better this time of year,' Rust said, 'So if you're looking out at the ocean, there could be sort of a mixture. You might see bigger groups, because it's sort of this combination of various pods of bottlenose dolphins.'
