Local Lifeguards, State Ramp Up Vigilance After Up-Island Shark Bites

In his 42 years as an East Hampton Town lifeguard, John Ryan Jr. has never seen or heard of a swimmer in East Hampton getting bitten by a shark.

Nonetheless, with a flurry of swimmers at Fire Island and Nassau County beaches in the last few weeks having been bitten by small sharks — not “Jaws”-like man-eating behemoths — Ryan, who is the head of the town’s lifeguards, has his crews on high alert and employing some unique new strategies to try to lessen the chances that someone is hurt by a shark on his watch.

“There’s never been one here — but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” Ryan said. “The sharks are there. It’s their ecosystem. Most of the time, they’re a few hundred yards out where the bunker are, so they’re not a problem. But we watch out for that one cruising the shoreline.”

Any adult who grew up going to South Fork beaches knows that lifeguards blaring their whistles and ordering swimmers out of the water because they’d spotted a shark near the beach is nothing new. The sharks have always been here.

But over the past decade, the stocks of a baitfish called bunker, or menhaden, have exploded. The bunker, each between 4 inches and a foot long, concentrate by the tens of millions in densely packed schools that spend most of the summer swirling in the ocean close to shore.

The dense schools have attracted whales and dolphins that beachgoers have marveled at from shore in recent summers.

They have also attracted more sharks to the waters close to the beach. ​And it’s possible that the frequency of shark bites will increase with the increased presence of sharks.

A shark biting a swimmer in Long Island waters had not been documented since the 1950s, until 2018, when two people were bitten while swimming. There were none in the intervening years before the five reported early this month, with six weeks still to go in the height of the summer swimming season.

Local lifeguards are trained on how to spot sharks in the water, picking out a dark shape that materializes beneath the surface, or differentiating the dorsal fin of a shark from that of a dolphin or harmless ocean sunfish.

This summer, the guards also have employed a 21st century tactic: using a drone to scan the waters of bathing beaches for signs of sharks from high above. Last week, when a school of bunker swam near shore during one of East Hampton Town’s junior lifeguard training classes, lifeguards on a Jet Ski drove the baitfish away, hoping to take any trailing sharks with them.

Even with such advanced tactics, only one shark has been spotted nearshore by East Hampton lifeguards — between Indian Wells and Atlantic beaches — and it wandered back to deep water before getting near any swimming areas, Ryan said.

A suspected shark sighting spurred lifeguards to call swimmers out of the water at Coopers Beach in Southampton Village last week, and Cupsogue Beach in Westhampton was closed to swimming for an afternoon on the day a lifeguard was bitten at nearby Smith Point County Park early this month.

That has been the extent thus far of the South Fork’s role in the “Summer of Sharks for Long Island Beaches,” as The New York Times dubbed it recently.

But anybody who follows Tim Regan’s popular YouTube or Instagram feeds knows that sharks swimming the shoreline of the South Fork have been exploding in numbers in recent years, and that this year, actually, hasn’t been quite as lively as some recent past years, yet.

Regan uses his own remote-control drone to capture videos of myriad marine species — sharks, whales, dolphin, bluefin tuna, striped bass, bluefish and others — that feast daily on the schools of bunker just beyond the surf line. He posts the videos on his YouTube channel, SouthForkSalt.

“Last year, they exploded — there were tons of sharks,” Regan said this week. “This year, I haven’t seen as many as I did last year, and they showed up later. But they’re there. I see them close, maybe 50 to 60 feet from the break every morning. They usually push out past the outer [sandbar] by 9:30 or 10 a.m. most days.”

The headlines blaring the news of recent “shark attacks” on Long Island’s beaches make Chris Paparo, a naturalist and manager of the Stony Brook University Marine Science Center in Shinnecock Hills, wince.

Paparo says these were not shark attacks, in the sense that the public thinks of such an event — basically, the “Jaws” version, where a large shark stalks and then devours an unsuspecting swimmer — and the tendency of media outlets to ramp up fears of sharks galls him.

“A shark attack means it is trying to eat you — you’re on its menu,” Paparo said. “These are bites. These are small sharks, with small mouths — they don’t have the jaw structure to bite through bones. They are fish eaters, and they are mistaking some part of a person for a small fish.”

Paparo noted that the bites suffered recently were mostly hand wounds, and that two of the victims were lifeguards who were both pretending to be a drowning victim in a training simulation, meaning they were flailing and thrashing about in the water, a behavior that can attract a shark’s attention.

A surfer who was bit, Paparo said, also was paddling on a day when the water was very murky, making it even more likely a shark would slash at something it saw just for an instant — a paddling hand diving into the water looking an awful lot like a fleeing baitfish.

Gavin Naylor, head of the Florida Program for Shark Research, said that shark bites in the Northeast are extremely rare considering the presence of sharks in close proximity to swimming areas, are relatively minor and are primarily “accidental” — a case of mistaken identity by a shark.

“Humans would be such easy prey for sharks — if they really wanted to go after people, we’d have thousands of bites a year,” he said. “Sixty percent of shark bites are in low-visibility water, because it’s easier for the shark to make a mistake.

“Even a white shark that attacks a person isn’t intending to attack a person — it’s feeding on seals, and it sees something similar that it takes for possibly being a seal,” Naylor added.

“A predator doesn’t have the luxury of hesitancy — they have to bite first and think later, or they go hungry. Unfortunately, when a white shark bites you, even if it’s only once, and then it swims away, it can be devastating, and people die. But the bites you see in the Northeast are usually quite minor punctures or tears.”

The original book “Jaws,” by Peter Benchley, is set not on the Martha’s Vineyard-like island in the movie, but in a village on the South Fork described as lying “between Bridgehampton and East Hampton.”

It would be far-fetched for such an event to actually happen here. Unlike on Cape Cod and other parts of New England, where deep waters lie just beyond the breaking surf, and large sharks are drawn to shore to feed on seals, the sea floor of Long Island slopes away from beaches very gradually and is only 10 or 15 feet deep for several hundred feet from shore, well beyond where most swimmers venture.

Healthy large sharks rarely wander into such depths and would be uneasy there, unlikely to be on the hunt. The Ocearch shark tagging project — most famous for its SharkTracker app that lets users follow the locations of some very large white sharks they have tagged — found that even the baby white sharks it was targeting for study in the waters off the South Fork were never seen in less than 30 feet of water. The big sharks have been tracked swimming into Gardiners Bay, however, where seals do live.

Paparo says that the populations of the smaller coastal sharks that do pose a threat to swimmers are on the upswing, thanks to conservation regulations that put an end to decades of slaughter of those species for their fins, a delicacy in Asian cuisine. Sand tiger, dusky and sandbar or brown sharks are rebounding in the North Atlantic, even while global shark populations are plummeting overall due mostly to overfishing.

“It’s good that they are coming back, even if it means we have to be more careful swimming,” Paparo said. “It means the ocean is healthier. It’s a good sign. We just have to learn to live with them.”

The five recent shark bite incidents, the easternmost of which took place at Smith Point County Park, just to the west of Moriches Inlet, spurred Governor Kathy Hochul to direct state agencies to expand safeguards at Long Island beaches. The State Police have dispatched helicopters and boats to patrol the coastline, state park lifeguards have expanded their overtime hours by 25 percent and the state is spearheading educational efforts about how swimmers can lessen the risk of shark interactions.

The state and shark experts say that avoiding turbulent or murky waters, not swimming after dusk, being aware of the presence of school of baitfish and not swimming near them and swimming in areas where your feet can touch the bottom will greatly reduce the risk. Removing jewelry that can flash underwater and look like a small baitfish is recommended, as is swimming in groups of two or more. Never swim in an area where seals are present.

Such basic precautions can reduce the already low likelihood of getting bitten by a shark far below other far more common activities in our daily lives, experts say.

“There were 73 unprovoked shark bites around the world last year,” Paparo said. “There were 2,000 deaths in car accidents just in New York State. You are in much more danger driving to the beach than you are swimming with sharks.”