17-foot shark leaves Outer Banks, shows up 2,000 miles east on other side of Atlantic

A 17-foot great white shark that lingered for months off North Carolina’s Outer Banks has mysteriously turned up 2,000 miles away — on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Satellite tracking shows the 50-year-old shark, named Nukumi, crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge last week and is now in the Northeast Atlantic, a trek experts say migratory species rarely make.

Why the 3,541-pound shark is making the journey isn’t understood, but scientists with OCEARCH think it may be due to pregnancy.

The waters off the Outer Banks are believed to be a mating ground for white sharks, and gestating females might head for deeper water to avoid aggressive males, OCEARCH speculates. White shark mating is brutal, with males biting the female to hold her in place.

Among the questions being asked: How close to Europe will the shark go?

“Only the most highly migratory fishes, like bluefin tunas, blue sharks, and shortfin makos, cross between the western and eastern Atlantic,” OCEARCH Chief Scientist Bob Hueter said in a news release.

“For Nukumi to reach the ridge and then move past it, she had to travel about 2,000 nautical miles from the North Carolina coast, which she left around February 22.”

The shark is averaging 44 miles a day, he said.

OCEARCH has fitted several dozen white sharks with satellite tags to track their movements along the East Coast, and it has shown they prefer to hug the coast.

Nukumi’s Track. Nukumi has since traveled over 5,570 miles and crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Nukumi’s Track. Nukumi has since traveled over 5,570 miles and crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Only one other shark, named Lydia, made transatlantic trip, back in 2014, OCEARCH says. She was also a large female: 14.6 feet and 2,000 pounds. The trip took her as far east as the Azores, about 850 miles off Portugal.

The battery in Lydia’s tracker ran out of energy in 2018, so her current location is unknown.

Nukumi was tagged off Nova Scotia in October and has since traveled 5,570 miles, tracking shows. The shark has been recorded as the largest white shark tagged by OCEARCH in the Northwest Atlantic.

“Nukumi and other sharks like her are apex predators of the ocean. They ... balance fish stocks,” OCEARCH founder Chris Fischer said in a release.

“Knowing these large females are spending significant time outside of US/Canadian waters demonstrates we must engage with the foreign fishing fleets throughout the North Atlantic,” he said. “If our large sharks don’t thrive, there simply will be no food in our oceans for future generations.”