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National Post

More great whites are visiting N.S. beaches. Is it time for a shark warning system like Cape Cod's?

Amid signs that the North Atlantic's great white shark population is growing, popular Cape Cod beaches are using technology to warn swimmers and surfers when it's time to get out of the water. Article content And while Nova Scotia is only 265 nautical miles away from Boston, as the shark swims, beachgoers in Canada's ocean playground have no such protections. Article content Article content 'We are able to detect tagged sharks — sharks that are carrying acoustic transmitters — and those transmitters are emitting a very high frequency sound that's detected by an array of acoustic receivers that we have set up around some of the more popular swimming beaches,' said Greg Skomal, a senior fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts division of marine fisheries and director of the state's shark research program. Article content Article content 'Any time one of those tagged sharks is detected by one of those receivers, it issues a notification through cell phone to the respective public safety officials for that beach.' Article content Article content Lifeguards get immediate warnings about the shark's nearby presence, he said. They could then put up flags, close the beach for an hour, or use other methods to pull people out of the water, Skomal said, noting anyone using Cape Cod's beaches can get the same white shark warnings sent straight to their phone through the free app called sharktivity. Article content 'We think it's a great warning system, but more so, really, an educational system for the public safety officials because we have to fully acknowledge that not all the sharks are tagged,' Skomal said in an interview from Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, where he has been tagging sharks in recent weeks. Article content 'We don't want people to have this false sense of security if they're not getting a notification.' Article content Cape Cod — where scientists see a high density of white sharks — has seen three incidents of sharks biting humans since 2012, one of which was fatal in September 2018. Article content Article content 'We've (also) had a couple of incidents where a paddle board or a kayak was bitten, but the individual was not,' Skomal said. Article content Article content Nova Scotia saw a white shark bite a young woman who jumped off a boat near Cape Breton's Margaree Island in August of 2021. A duck hunter also lost his dog to a shark bite off Port Medway in 2023. Article content 'Nova Scotia is interesting; it has lots of white sharks visiting,' said Skomal, who has tagged sharks in waters around the province. Article content 'We just published a paper that shows the increase in the number of white sharks visiting Nova Scotia and Canada over the last ten years,' he said. 'It's at least a two-fold increase.' Article content Scientists believe the white shark population is rebounding due to conservation measures that reduced the number of them killed as bycatch in other fisheries, and an abundance of grey seals — their favourite prey — now that people no longer hunt them.