White sharks resurfacing; Volunteers step forward for bay's first white shark week

With great white sharks being increasingly in the news along the East Coast, the Quoddy region is contributing to the uptick with the first Passamaquoddy White Shark Week, a volunteer survey of the waters to observe large sharks in the area. The survey is part of an effort to see whether white sharks are mating and breeding in the Passamaquoddy Bay region. Observing such behavior has long been considered by some as the "holy grail" of white shark ecological research.

During the survey week, from July 19 through 26, only one great white shark was observed, but the coordinator, Steve Crawford, a fish ecologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, notes that local fishermen and tour operators report that most of the seasonal migrations are about three weeks late and the large, breeding sharks that volunteers were looking for only start arriving around the middle of August during a normal year.

Crawford does point out, though, there was a great deal of local interest in the effort to find out more about the behavior and number of sharks in the area. With only one week's notice about shark week, he was flooded with emails from over 30 people throughout the Quoddy region. The members of a volunteer survey team put in over 180 hours actively searching for large white sharks in area waters.

"Simply put, I was still absolutely blown away by the natural passion and interest of Indigenous/local community members of this Passamaquoddy Bay region," he says.

Community members had suggested that Crawford coordinate the event after he learned that several people in the Quoddy area had observed a range of behaviors consistent with courtship, including the unexplored possibility of male mating territoriality. With two notable local knowledge exceptions, both in New Zealand, "nobody has ever documented mating by white sharks anywhere in their nine different populations globally," Crawford says. "Based on the available evidence from Indigenous and local knowledge systems, we have a decent chance of finding and recording something special in Passamaquoddy Bay."

Crawford has already conducted more than 200 interviews with local knowledge holders from Florida to Quebec about great white sharks as part of a five-year study. Based on the interviews he has completed, he says that there is no place in the northwest Atlantic that has as many breeding-size adults, and he has put forward the hypothesis that great white sharks are mating and breeding Passamaquoddy Bay. Crawford says he is now seeking the kind of grounded ecological knowledge that has typically been undervalued by scientists.

During the Passamaquoddy Bay White Shark Week, volunteers surveyed seven of the 11 identified regions, with the Cobscook channel receiving the greatest amount of survey effort, due in large part to a single volunteer who was working full-time on the water. Some areas, though, did not receive much if any survey effort, including parts of Campobello and Deer Island and the St. Croix River estuary. Ron Fournier of St. Stephen shared reports of his visual observations while flying helicopter tours around Minister's Island and Campobello. While he did not see any sharks during the week, he has seen multiple large sharks in Passamaquoddy Bay earlier this season. During the week, there were only two deployments of drones, and Crawford comments that, based on Fournier's helicopter observations, he expects that "future drone deployments will become a game‑changing factor in future active searches for white sharks in Passamaquoddy Bay."

The one shark that was observed was reported on the last day of the week, when team member Edward Woods sent in video by Josh Clinch of St. George of his prolonged encounter with a 12-foot to 14-foot white shark he observed while boating near Head Harbour Lighthouse on the north end of Campobello. Crawford interviewed Clinch and says he "described some very unusual surface rolling behavior and extended circling and traversing of his vessel."

Crawford hopes that U.S., Canadian and Indigenous residents of the area will lead the effort going forward, and he hopes that another survey will be done later in August or September of this year. Of the survey work, he says that the "potential for people to carry on in the future rests with them," while he adds that he is "always available and will do anything I can to help."

By engaging with Indigenous and local knowledge holders through rigorous natural‑science methodologies, Crawford hopes he can "craft meaningful recommendations on how future generations of ecologists could pursue this kind of knowledge system research."