LIDO BEACH, NY – It was a classic early summer Friday at Point Lookout Beach on Long Island, with beachgoers frolicking in the frothy waves and basking under the sunny skies.
But farther out, just past the swimmers, was a more urgent scene: a lifeguard on a jet ski circling continuously as Nassau County police officers inspected the water by boat and helicopter.
It was an example of the intensified shark patrols along Long Island’s more than 100 miles of beaches, which have followed a surge in sightings this past summer.
“It’s become part of our daily routine,” a lifeguard supervisor, Justine Anderson, said of the shark patrols her lifeguards started in Town of Hempstead this summer. “We patrol all day and respond immediately if we receive a report of a shark sighting.”
In the past, Ms Anderson said, shark sightings have been extremely rare. But last summer brought daily cases of sharks eating baitfish alarmingly close to swimmers, necessitating temporary closures of swimming areas along the Long Island coast.
So far this summer, a 10-foot mako shark washed up at Point Lookout over Memorial Day weekend, sparking another round of shark heads. And just this week, authorities said a man swimming off Jones Beach may have been bitten by a shark.
Lifeguards who work on Long Island’s beaches in summer have traditionally been expected to simply pay attention to the occasional dorsal fin and assess the validity of reports from nervous beachgoers who swear they just saw the second coming of “Jaws.”
But now lifesaving units on Long Island — simultaneously battling staffing problems from a shortage of national lifeguards — are taking the shark situation more seriously.
On Friday, Nassau County director Bruce Blakeman held a news conference at nearby Nickerson Beach to announce that police would be conducting more patrols this summer, both by boat and helicopter, to run over the shoreline every hour.
Numerous other departments on Long Island have also begun adopting new shark monitoring strategies, expanding their life-saving tools to include drones, jet skis, and paddleboards, as well as online shark tracking. Local police are now also tasked with shark patrols by boat and helicopter.
At Jones Beach and Robert Moses State Park, nearly 20 lifeguards, park police and other beach workers were recently trained to fly a fleet of seven drones as part of a new aerial shark monitoring program.
“It’s like a new world we live in,” said Cary Epstein, an experienced security guard at Jones Beach, which along with Robert Moses State Park employs about 375 lifeguards. “In my 25 years as a lifeguard, we have never had to do this.”
“This isn’t ‘Jaws’, we’re not talking about a big white man-eating machine — but if a thresher shark comes through and nibbles on your foot, that could be a problem,” Mr. Epstein said.
A new drone unit on Jones Beach is following Mr. Epstein’s lead; he began monitoring the waters with his own personal drone last summer after a fellow guard was cut in his leg while swimming, believed to be by a shark. A day later, swimming was canceled due to a shark sighting.
“We are absolutely vigilant and are doing our due diligence,” Mr Epstein said, noting that they were “not unnecessarily searching for sharks.”
The beaches of the town of Hempstead have hired additional lifeguards to watch out for sharks this summer and have mobilized a shark patrol on jet skis, as well as a drone squadron. In addition to water rescue techniques and CPR, the city’s ocean guards are also trained to differentiate between shark species, to identify shark species that are more dangerous to swimmers.
Lifeguards at nearby Long Beach, which closed swimming areas more than a dozen times last summer due to shark reports, have invested in three jet skis to assist with shark patrols.
Further east, Smith Point lifeguards conduct shark patrols on jet skis and paddleboards in the morning, beach officials said. They have also started packing tourniquets in their first aid kits in case of shark attacks.
And in East Hampton, lifeguards use an online shark tracker to monitor the return of large sharks like Mary Lee, a 4,000-pound, 17-foot-long great white tagged with a tracking device.
Of course, the mere mention of sharks and summer beaches frustrates marine experts who say the animals pose no real heightened danger to swimmers.
Attacks are extremely rare locally and many experts say shark patrols do little more than fuel the unwarranted terror of sharks.
Hans Walters, a field scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium who has studied sharks in New York’s waters for more than a decade, said the latest hype about sharks near the beaches was “highly exaggerated.”
The threat to humans from sharks is practically non-existent, he said, and there’s no real evidence that local shark populations have increased in recent years.
“The danger to humans is infinitesimally small,” he said.
There may have been as few as a dozen documented shark attacks in New York’s waters dating back centuries, he said, and most of those were more likely accidental collisions that resulted in a cut, rather than a shark actively biting a swimmer.
Swimmers should be sure, said Mr. Walter, that sharks are not interested in them.
“If anyone’s been in the ocean, they’ve already swam with sharks,” he said. “They just don’t know.”
The main reasons for more sightings, according to Mr. Walters, are an increase in surveillance and an increase in the sharing of citizen phone and drone photos, which have become widespread on social media and inevitably make headlines.
“These sharks are not looking for humans,” he said. “They’ve been hunting the ocean for millions of years and there aren’t any sharks here this year, or last year, or the year before that. We just look for them more.”
Nevertheless, given the increased public concern, many beach operators are trying to assure beachgoers that they are watching out for them.
“When the mako washed ashore, it raised concerns among residents,” Hempstead city supervisor Don Clavin said. “So we wanted them to be able to trust that our people are taking all these precautions, that everything is monitored and that we are doing everything we can.”
Spinner sharks feeding on baitfish are regularly seen in Long Beach, said lifeguard chief Paul Gillespie.
But while he dismissed much of the fuss about sharks as media and political hype, he added: “You can’t shit it either, so we always investigate every report by getting the jet skis in the water and looking up and down.” coastline.”
On the beaches of Town of East Hampton, sharks that scavenge hundreds of feet away are tolerated, but if they get much closer than 200 feet from shore, swimming is restricted, said John Ryan Jr., the town’s lifeguard.
“They feed on carrion — they don’t cruise the shorelines looking for people,” he said. “But if you don’t do anything and then something happens, that’s a problem.”
Chris Stefanou, 26, a Long Island fisherman who participates in a federal shark-marking program that monitors shark migration, said he had seen more sharks in local waters each year as water temperatures rose.
There is a growing presence of hammerhead and bull sharks locally, which have previously avoided the colder local waters, according to Mr Stefanou, who said he had caught nearly 1,000 sharks – up to 14 feet in length – while surfing from local beaches over the past few years. nine years. (He shows off his catches on Instagram.)
“There are more and more sharks in the water, which sounds scary,” he said. “But it’s actually a good thing because it reflects a healthy ecosystem.”
