960-Pound Great White Shark Heading Toward Long Island

Long Island has a new great white shark visitor. Yeti, an 11-foot, 960-pound female shark, last pinged off the Long Island coast, south of the Hamptons Sunday night, according to OCEARCH, a nonprofit organization dedicated to shark research that tracks Yeti and other sharks around the world.

Yeti had been heading south for the past month after being tagged in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on Oct. 7, but she made a westerly turn toward Long Island on Saturday.

Yeti is nowhere near the size of Mary Lee, the much more famous 3,400-pound great white shark that has skirted along the Long Island shore at times over the past two years.

"Yeti is the fifth shark tagged on Expedition Nantucket," said Robert Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory. "These sharks will allow us to track their movements in real-time via long-term satellite and acoustic tracking for more than five years, revealing multi-year cycles in their migrations. This is new information not possible with other types of tagging. And the health assessments done onboard OCEARCH through blood, parasite, genetic and mucus sampling will show us the healing properties of these creatures and the threats they face. Together all this new data will teach us how to protect the white sharks of the Atlantic Ocean."

Great white shark researchers at OCEARCH announced over the summer that they had discovered the first North Atlantic nursery for the fearsome predator in the waters off Montauk — explaining the recent surge in great white sharks in the region.

RELATED:

• Exactly a Year After Her Last Visit, 3,400-Pound Great White Shark Returns to Long Island
• Great White Shark Nursery Found in Waters Off Montauk: Researchers

Track Yeti and other sharks on the OCEARCH website here.

Photos by OCEARCH