Recent fish and marine mammal sightings off the coast of South Florida has some longtime fishermen stunned, and at least in one case some local researchers shocked.
In January, James Paskiewicz captured video of a great white shark when he was out on the water near the Keys. He said the encounter lasted for several minutes and the large fish seemed incredibly curious.
“It’s wonderful. I mean, it’s just, I’m totally fascinated by sharks and you know, as it’s basically a dream come true,” Paskiewicz said.
University of Miami researchers with the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science say great whites are like snowbirds seeking warmth. They migrate through the Atlantic to get to the Gulf of America.
“They like somewhat deeper water than a lot of our fishermen spend most of their time in. They are a pretty rare sight but that doesn’t mean they are not present. It just means we don’t see them all that often,” Dr. Catherine Macdonald said.
Macdonald is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist and Research Assistant Professor at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. She is also the director of the school’s Shark Research and Conservation Program.
Whales make an appearance close to shore
In December, Ryan Preston, spotted a majestic sight when he was working in Biscayne Bay – a humback whale breaching the water.
“I’ve never seen a humpback and I don’t know anybody that’s seen a humpback off of South Florida,” he said. “They were usually way offshore in between, you know, halfway in between Miami and the Bahamas, not in 50 feet of water, you know, on top of a reef.”
Dr. Maria Cartolano, a lecturer at the Rosenstiel School in the Marine Biology and Ecology Department, said humpback whales are found in all major oceans.
“Seeing humpback whales in Miami is really rare but it is possible,” Cartolona said. “They will actually make migrations from the very northern North Atlantic all the way down to the Caribbean and they will do that to come to the warmer waters to breed.”
However, the mammal’s close proximity to shore has raised some questions.
“It could just be that they are interested and that they wanted to come closer to shore. It’s just not fully understood,” Cartolona said.
There is one recent sighting that has some scientists baffled. Captain Abie Raymond could not believe his eyes when he spotted a gray whale last winter near Sunny Isles Beach .
“It’s only a 26 ft boat, so that 40 or 50 foot whale just dwarfed us when it went underneath it. It really just humbled us,” Raymond said.
It was a stunning sight, according to Corotlona, because gray whales were hunted to near extinction in the 1700s and have not been seen in the Atlantic for hundreds of years.
“So that may be due to climate, just in that they are now able to make their way through passages when there’s less sea ice in certain seasons to be able to access the Atlantic ocean again,” she said.
