Great White Shark Mary Lee Headed Back Toward Long Island

She's back! For the third time in three years, a 3,4oo-pound shark, Mary Lee, is headed toward Long Island.

Mary Lee, the famous great white shark who has 114,000 followers on Twitter, made headlines last year when she was tracked off the East Hampton coast.

And now, Friday morning, Mary Lee was seen heading toward Long Beach with a ping placing her in the area at 6:29 a.m.

Mary Lee is 3,456 pounds and 16-feet long and has traveled almost 34,000 miles since she was first tagged off Cape Cod in September 2012, according to OCEARCH.

And she's not the only shark making news: This week, one of nine great white shark pups, Manhattan, made his way back to a shark nursery in Montauk.

In fact, experts say, there's a baby boom of great white sharks expected in the coming months — and the massive mama sharks are about to head to the nursery, located off the coast of Montauk, for the big event.

Last year, researchers were able to tag great white shark pups at the first North Atlantic nursery for the fearsome predator in the waters off Montauk, and this year, with the baby sharks tagged, more information than ever before is available to the public, who've taken to avidly following the sharks on social media.

Sharks tagged by Ocearch.org are pinging and revealing their locations via satellite.

But Mary Lee, who has 114,000 followers on Twitter, continues to capture the fascination of the public.

According to OCEARCH, the nonprofit organization dedicated to shark research that tracks Mary Lee and about 100 other sharks around the world, she was not initially expected back to the East End in 2017 and was not expected to make a reappearance until 2018, when she'll be due to give birth again.

"You guys are sitting in a birthing area"

According to Chris Fischer, an OCEARCH team was in the Montauk area last year because Mary Lee had moved into the area.

Mary Lee holds a soft spot in Fischer's heart. "She was named after my mom. We tagged her in 2012 off Cape Cod," he said.

When she made that move in the New York-New Jersey area and was seen near Southampton and then Montauk, the thought was that she may have given birth, he said.

Then, after looking at a scientific paper authored by Jack Casey and Wes Pratt, and another by Tobey Curtis, shark researcher with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Fisheries Service,, the OCEARCH team caught nine pups, lifted them up onto the ship, and performed research projects including taking gas, blood and tissue samples.

New umbilical scars on the pups indicated that it was, indeed, a birthing site, Fischer said, with the pups 1 to 3 months old.

Now that the pups are being tracked, a whole new age of discovery has evolved, Fischer said. "Now we are watching the young of the year, watching them define the nursery of the great white shark."

That first year, he explained, is when the pups are most vulnerable. Once they're larger and older, they can avoid various types of gear and danger.

"They're the lions of the ocean, the balance keepers," he said.

Understanding how they move through the nursery helps ensure an abundance of the entire ecosystem and "an abundance of fish that our future children will eat," Fischer said.

Also this week, according to Curtis, the pup named Manhattan pinged at 6:30 a.m. off Montauk Wednesday morning, the first of the nine pups tagged in the great white shark nursery last summer to complete the first full loop of the migration cycle.

"It's just one shark so far" that's returned home, Curtis said, but the hope is that others will follow.

Manhattan, he said, pinged south of Martha's Vineyard Tuesday then "hung a left" and headed back to Montauk.

The baby great whites off Montauk are balancing the in-shore system, chasing menhaden, mackerel and squid, "eating the weak, the dead and dying so the strong will survive. They're the balance keepers of the water here. When they grow up, they're the balance keepers of the whole North Atlantic," Fischer said.

Soothing shark fears

Fischer has a message for the many who've spent decades terrified by "Jaws."

The fear of sharks, he said, is "an irrational fear over something that doesn't statistically exist. You've got to realize, nothing has changed. These baby sharks have been there, off Montauk, for 400 million years. Nothing has changed. We just know now."

He added, "Movies of the past were able to leverage the fear of the unknown. What we are doing now is putting some facts behind the lives of sharks, replacing fear with facts and fascination."

The OCEARCH team made news with its tagging of shark pups last year at the North Atlantic nursery. To read that full prior Patch report, click here.

Photo and video courtesy of OCEARCH