Great whites have been swimming near the coast of Cape Cod every summer since 2009. But this year, residents can use an app to track where these large sharks have been spotted. 

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy launched the app "Sharktivity" on July 1. It can be downloaded for free on iPhones. The app notifies beach goers when a shark has been spotted nearby. People can also report their own shark spottings to the app.

The president of the conservancy said the app can be used to raise public awareness and can function as a beach patrol alert. 

This summer, the first great white shark of this season was tagged on June 17 off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts. The second shark was seen on June 20 off Nauset Beach. And, if last year is any indication, the citizens of Cape Cod should expect to see more great whites as the summer progresses. 

The sharks often hunt off the coast of Cape Cod because of the area's large seal population. Last year, beaches were closed several times last season because groups of sharks were repeatedly seen approaching the shore.

But beachgoers shouldn't worry too much. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, sharks killed only six people in 2015. 

To help stave off any lurking fears you may have, though, Discovery Channel and NOAA Fisheries Service offer some helpful tips to avoid being attacked by a shark:

• Swim in groups. Sharks are more likely to attack people swimming alone.
• Avoid swimming at dawn and dusk, when sharks usually feed.
• Don't enter the water with any kind of open cut.
• Take off shiny jewelry before swimming. Jewelry looks like fish scales in the water, and it is more likely to attract sharks.
• Try not to splash. Sharks may mistake all this splashing for an injured prey (in other words, an easy meal).

While it's easy to be afraid of sharks if you've seen Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller "Jaws," swimmers really don't have too much to worry about. And "Sharktivity" will let you know if there is a shark nearby. 

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A wearable electric shark deterrent can effectively repel great white sharks, according to our independent tests of the device.

The manufacturers of the A$749 Shark Shield Freedom 7TM say it works by emitting an electric field around the wearer. This causes uncomfortable muscle spasms in sharks that swim too close and discourages them from coming into contact.

Our research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that the device does indeed make sharks keep their distance. Upon first encounter with a Shark Shield, all approaching great white sharks were effectively deterred, staying an average of 1.3m away from a baited canister with the device attached.

After multiple approaches, individual great white sharks showed signs of habituation to the Shark Shield, coming an average of 12cm closer on each successive approach. Despite this increase in tolerance, 89% of white sharks continued to be deterred from biting or interacting with the bait.

Don’t take the bait

We carried out our testing in Mossel Bay, South Africa, in 2014. We used custom-built cameras equipped with bait and either an inactive (control) or active Shark Shield. Using a video analysis technique traditionally used to measure the size of fish, we were able to determine exactly how closely the sharks approached the device.

We analyzed a total of 322 encounters involving 41 individual white sharks, ranging from 2m to 4m long.

Only one great white shark came into contact with the bait in the presence of an active Shark Shield, and only after multiple approaches. The interaction in question simply involved a bump of the bait canister rather than a full bite. In contrast, bites were common during control trials.

Although the effectiveness of the Shark Shield probably varies between shark species, it is encouraging to note its effect on great white sharks, the species implicated in the majority of fatal incidents worldwide. This suggests it could be an important safety consideration for a range of ocean users such as surfers, divers, spear fishers and open-water swimmers.

We also found no evidence that the Shark Shield attracted sharks from further away, which is a common myth among surfers.

A useful tool

Besides showing that the Shark Shield can ward off sharks, our method provides an accurate way to test the effectiveness of any type of shark deterrent that is currently available or likely to enter the market.

But, most importantly for now, we have finally given the public some evidence that there is an effective way to reduce the risk of a negative encounter with a shark.

Instead of the redundant debate about culling sharks as a response to shark-bite incidents, ocean-goers can now proactively take extra precautions, by using proven technology to reduce their already very low risk of injury.

There are many shark deterrent devices on the market, particularly those that use electric or magnetic fields. But without robust, independent scientific evaluation we can’t be sure which of these products actually work. In fact, not only may some devices not be as effective as others, but it is also possible that some of them could actually attract sharks rather than repel them.

Robust scientific evaluation of these types of devices will help the public make informed decisions about how they can reduce their risk of encountering a shark.

It’s important to note that the likelihood of being involved in a negative encounter with a shark is exceptionally low. As a result, some will argue that the use of expensive technology to mitigate that risk even further is unnecessary. Furthermore, no device is likely to guarantee 100% protection from any species of shark.

But at present, under the conditions in which we tested it, this is one device that does seem to offer a genuine benefit. So if you feel that you need extra protection from sharks when entering the water, this device will offer you exactly that.

This article was written with the help of Channing Egeberg, a University of Western Australia marine euroecology MSc graduate and cofounder of Support our Sharks.

Ryan Kempster, Shark biologist, University of Western Australia and Shaun Collin, Winthrop Professor/WA Premier's Research Fellow, School of Animal Biology and the Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa’s great white sharks could die out due to human interference, ocean pollution and a limited gene pool, a new study released on Wednesday showed.

There are 350-520 great white sharks left off the South African coast, 50 percent fewer than previously thought, according to a six year study carried out mainly in Gansbaai, a shark hotspot 160 kilometers from Cape Town.

"South Africa’s white sharks faced a rapid decline in the last generation and their numbers might already be too low to ensure their survival,” said Sara Andreotti, research leader and marine biologist at the University of Stellenbosch.

Scientists say there are still thousands of great white sharks off the coast of Australia, Canada and the east coast of the United States.

Thousands of tourists travel to South Africa's Western Cape each year to catch a glimpse of the ocean's top predator from underwater cages, but human interaction has made the largest contribution to declining local shark numbers.

Shark nets used to protect swimmers and surfers killed more than 1,000 great whites off the Durban coast in the 30 years up to 2008, while trophy hunting and pollution also killed off large numbers of a species which can trace its lineage back 14 million years.

South African great white sharks also have the lowest genetic diversity of all white shark populations globally, making breeding more problematic and the likelihood of illness higher, the study, which included documenting individual sharks by their dorsal fins, showed.

There are only 333 great whites capable of breeding in South African waters, below the 500 usually needed to prevent "inbreeding depression", the study found.

"We are already in a situation where our number of breeders is below the minimum level required for a population to survive," Andreotti told reporters.

Losing great white sharks, which have no natural predators, would have a knock-on effect on ocean ecology. Common prey, such as the Cape fur seal, could flourish in their absence and reduce fish numbers.

South Africa helped pioneer great white shark conservation and in 1991 became the first in the world to declare the predator a protected species, with other countries including the U.S. and Australia following suit. 

(Editing by Joe Brock)

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Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers great Warren Sapp just wanted to catch some lobster — and then it all went wrong.

Sapp was bitten by a shark.

According to the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday, Sapp was enjoying his retirement, off the coast of Marathon, Florida, on a lobster charter. When he reached his arm into the water to snatch up a lobster, a "small nurse shark," about 4 feet long, emerged from the depths and took a bite out of Sapp's arm.

"It's simple," charter captain Jack Carlson told the Times via text message. "He was lobstering with me and a shark bit Sapp while he was grabbing the lobster. He's OK."

According to Carlson, sharks often hide out in lobster holes.

"The sharks hang around those lobster holes, because they feed on the lobster as well," Carlson said.

Nothing but a flesh wound, Sapp's shark bite didn't end his lobstering journey prematurely.

"We bandaged it up, put some gauze on there, some black electrical tape and hit a couple more spots, then headed in,"Carlson said.

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Around Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the Gulf Stream veers east, flowing away from the coastline of the US and out into the Atlantic Ocean. Away from the stabilizing influence of the continent, the powerful current revels in its new freedom, spawning large circulating masses of water called eddies that scientists describe as the hurricanes of the ocean.

Now, in preliminary research, scientists are trying to figure out how great white sharks may use the spinning features.

Eddies are ubiquitous in the surface waters of the world's oceans. Many form when parcels of moving water pinch off from the main body of fast-moving currents like the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water from the subtropics and tropics to regions of the North Atlantic Ocean. On average, the swirls can stretch nearly 125 miles across and typically last weeks or months.

In the new research, Peter Gaube, a biophysical oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleagues investigated how great white sharks may interact with the swirling pools of water. They partnered with OCEARCH, a nonprofit that tracks the movements of numerous sharks using satellite tags. Every time a tagged shark surfaces, its tracking device "pings" a satellite, creating a record of the shark's movements over time.

The scientists paired the travel histories of two female great white sharks — named Mary Lee and Lydia — with the locations of eddies in the North Atlantic. One of the animals was also tagged with a device that recorded water temperature and depth every 15 seconds.

They found for the first time that the sharks appear to prefer the cores of anticyclonic eddies— those that have centers of water warmer than the surrounding ocean — to cyclonic, or cold-core, eddies while swimming in this region of the ocean. In particular, the depth data revealed that the tagged female appeared to spend more time and dive deeper in the warm-core eddies found near the Gulf Stream.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The researchers suggest that the sharks' need to regulate their body temperatures could explain the longer, deeper dives observed in warm-core eddies. And it's possible that the animals are targeting those areas to feed, said Gaube, who presented the research at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans last month.

That would be a surprising finding, said Scarla Weeks, a biophysical oceanographer at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, because "in warm-core eddies, there generally isn't forage food."

Instead, the animals that she's studied — including manta rays and seabirds — all target the boundaries of cold-core eddies because that's where the food hangs out, said Weeks, who wasn't involved in the research.

In general, the centers of cold-core eddies have more nutrient-rich water than the warm-core ones. Those nutrients, plus sunlight, fuel the growth of tiny organisms like phytoplankton, which tend to accumulate at the periphery of the cold-core eddies. Animals higher up the food chain follow.

The marine delicacies that may lure sharks to the heart of a North Atlantic Charybdis remain, for the moment, a mystery. But Gaube has a guess: "Atlantic pomfret. They'd be the perfect shark snack."

Anecdotal evidence from a colleague suggests that the silvery fish, which can grow up to a few feet long, appear to congregate in anticyclones at depths similar to those the shark dived to, he said.

Though the researchers can't draw firm conclusions from data comprising just two sharks, "it's a good start ... and quite exciting science," Weeks said. Teasing out how animals use oceanic eddies — for foraging or for migration, for example — is important because it can "help us understand and, therefore, potentially conserve some of our species," she said. "And it can also help us understand our oceans better and what impact climate change is having."

Scientists are still figuring out how eddies evolve in time and space and how they transport heat, salt, dissolved carbon dioxide, and other materials throughout the ocean, said Bo Qiu, a physical oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, who wasn't involved in the research. That movement of heat and other materials in the ocean plays an important role in regulating the planet's climate, he said. Knowing how eddies work is crucial to understanding how climate change may be affecting them and what the effects of such changes might be.

For now, the next step for the researchers is uncovering what might lurk in the warm-core eddies. Figuring out that missing piece could help explain why the sharks seem to use the features differently than other species.

To do just that, Gaube is planning to return to the region in May.

"There's something good here. I can feel it," he said. "This is going to be really fun."

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Who hasn't shared an amazing science fact about sharks, cats, bats, ostriches, or other animals, only to feel embarrassed later on when you find out the information was wrong?

No more.

It's time to put an end to these myths, misconceptions, and inaccuracies about animals passed down through the ages.

To help the cause we've rounded up and corrected dozens of the more popular myths we keep hearing repeated.

Have any favorites we missed? Send them to science@techinsider.io.

Kevin Loria, Lauren Friedman, Kelly Dickerson, Jennifer Welsh, and Sarah Kramer contributed to this post. Robert Ferris contributed to a previous version.

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MYTH: There are bugs in your strawberry Frappuccino.

This one is no longer true.

Before April 2012, Starbucks' strawberry Frappucino contained a dye made from the ground-up bodies of thousands of tiny insects, called cochineal bugs (or Dactylopius coccus).

Farmers in South and Central America make a living harvesting — and smashing — the bugs that go into the dye. Their crushed bodies produce a deep red ink that is used as a natural food coloring, which was "called cochineal" red but is now called "carmine color."

Starbucks stopped using carmine color in their strawberry Frappucinos in 2012. But the dye is still used in thousands of other food products — from Nerds candies to grapefruit juice. Not to mention cosmetics, like lovely shades of red lipstick.

Sources: Business Insider, CHR Hansen, AmericanSweets.co.uk, FoodFacts.com, LA Times

MYTH: Beaver butt secretions are in your vanilla ice cream.

You've probably heard that a secretion called castoreum, isolated from the anal gland of a beaver, is used in flavorings and perfumes.

But castoreum is so expensive, at up to $70 per pound of anal gland (the cost to humanely milk castoreum from a beaver is likely even higher), that it's unlikely to show up in anything you eat.

In 2011, the Vegetarian Resource Group wrote to five major companies that produce vanilla flavoring and asked if they use castoreum. The answer: According to the Federal Code of Regulations, they can't. (The FDA highly regulates what goes into vanilla flavoring and extracts.)

It's equally unlikely you'll find castoreum in mass-marketed goods, either.

Sources: Business Insider, Vegetarian Resource Group, FDA, NY Trappers Forum

MYTH: Dogs and cats are colorblind.

Dogs and cats have much better color vision than we thought.

Both dogs and cats can see in blue and green, and they also have more rods — the light-sensing cells in the eye — than humans do, so they can see better in low-light situations.

This myth probably comes about because each animal sees colors differently than humans.

Reds and pinks may appear more green to cats, while purple may look like another shade of blue. Dogs, meanwhile, have fewer cones — the color-sensing cells in the eye — so scientists estimated that their color vision is only about 1/7th as vibrant as ours.

Sources: Today I Found Out, Business Insider

Sharks often get a bad rap simply because people are afraid of them.

But for photographer Michael Muller, sharks are fascinating, and they make for stunning  subjects in his photography series and book, SHARKS, published by Taschen.

Muller was not originally a nature photographer. He is actually well-known for his celebrity work, having shot the cover of Rihanna's Unapologetic album and the movie poster for Deadpool. He has also photographed Michael Phelps during the Olympics.

But over the last decade, he has developed a fascination with sharks after his wife had booked a cage-diving trip for his birthday. Of course, Muller told Business Insider, before he went, he was a little apprehensive — especially after seeing the movie "Jaws." But despite that fear, he felt compelled to go. 

"I went out to Guadalupe Island, about 200 nautical miles off Mexico's Baja Peninsula; it’s a volcanic island," he said. "I was the first one in the water at six in the morning ... I was down there for about five minutes, and out of the darkness comes this first great white. It just swims right by me and we lock eyes, and I was like 'I see you and I know you see me'. There was a connection."

From that point on, he said, he knew that he had to continue to dive and photograph these majestic creatures. Here are some of his breathtaking photos. 

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It all started with an underwater camera and National Geographic.

Muller received his first camera from his father when he was living in Saudi Arabia in about fourth grade. It was a Minolta Weathermatics. 

With that camera, he took a photo of a photo of a shark in National Geographic, processed the film, and showed all of his school buddies, telling them that he had shot it in the Red Sea. Muller said they were all blown away, but eventually, he did confess to the truth. Still, he said, this is when he realized just how powerful photography can be.

It was then that he decided to become a professional photographer.

At the beginning of his shark career, Muller knew that he needed new technology to capture the true beauty of sharks.

While photographing Michael Phelps and other Olympic swimmers, Muller started looking for better underwater lighting.  After looking around online — and being unsatisfied with everything he found — he decided created  his own underwater lights to effectively bring his photography studio underwater.

After a few false starts, he ended up partnering with a team of people that included an engineer from the Jet Propulsion Labs at NASA. They worked together to create something that hadn't before existed.

They used these newly invented lights for the first time in the Galapagos, photographing hundreds of hammerheads. 

During one particular dive, the idea for the book, SHARKS, was cemented in Muller's mind.

It was while photographing those hammerheads that he got the idea for his book. Before that dive, he said, he was unaware of millions of sharks that were being killed each year. 

"I looked around and said 'I don’t know if my daughters are going to be able to see what I’m seeing now'. And then I said 'maybe I can change people’s perceptions'," Muller declared. 

He went back to Guadalupe about six months later with seven assistants, strobe lights, the first submersible self-propelled cage, and cinema cage with no grates to start shooting the photos that would ultimately make it into his book. 

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Aodhán Ó Gogáin, a PhD candidate in the School of Natural Sciences at Ireland's Trinity College, uncovered an interesting new bit of information about a 300-million-year-old shark.  

New fossils of fecal matter found in Canada revealed something a little unsettling — these sharks were feasting on their own young, possibly in times of low food supply. The findings were published Thursday in the journal Paleontology.

Within the fossils, there were loads of juvenile shark teeth. Scientists think that this species, Orthacanthus, lived in oily waters in swamps off the coast of Europe and North America, surrounded by hot jungles. When nothing else was available, these top predators might have dipped into their own population to keep from going hungry.

Scientists refer to this behavior as "fillial cannibalism."

Gogáin described what the shark would have looked like in a press release.

"Orthacanthus was a three-metre-long xenacanth shark with a dorsal spine, an eel-like body, and tricusped teeth," he said. "There is already evidence from fossilized stomach contents that ancient sharks like Orthacanthus preyed on amphibians and other fish, but this is the first evidence that these sharks also ate the young of their own species."

He said they were probably similar to the bull sharks of today, in the fact that they can survive in both brackish swamps and shallow oceans.Gogáin also mentioned that this may be part of the way fish started to colonize inland fresh waters.  

Another co-author of the study, Dr. Howard Falcom-Lang of the Royal Holloway University of London, noted in the release that although the juvenile shark teeth were found in the fecal matter of adults, there is still some question as to why. But, because the time that these sharks lived at was also the time in which marine fish were moving into freshwater locations, there might have been a decreased food supply for the sharks. This could have caused them to eat their own young for survival — an ironic twist on trying to keep the species alive.

However, it looks like this isn't the only time a species has been forced to cannibalize its own members in attempts to survive. Recently, seagulls in Washington State have started eating their own chicks, for example, because rising water temperatures have caused plankton, their main food source, to vanish. 

So, while it may seem like an usually sinister phenomenon, cannibalistic ways appear to be a long-practiced final resort for animals who are trying to hold on in the face of changing environmental conditions. 

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Greenland shark, a big and slow-moving deep-ocean predator that prowls the frigid waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic, can claim the distinction of being the planet's longest-living vertebrate, with a lifespan perhaps reaching about 400 years.

Its extremely sluggish growth rate, about four-tenths of a inch (1 cm) per year, had already tipped off scientists that it lived a very long time, and research published on Thursday calculated the Greenland shark's lifespan for the first time.

Danish marine biologist Julius Nielsen said radiocarbon dating that analyzed the shark's eye lens found that the oldest of 28 sharks studied was likely about 392 years old, with 95 percent certainty of an age range between 272 and 512 years.

Females astoundingly did not reach sexual maturation until they were at least 134 years old, Nielsen said.

The Greenland shark, up to about 18 feet (5.5 meters) long, is among the largest carnivorous sharks.

Nielsen, a University of Copenhagen doctoral student who led the study published in the journal Science, said the findings should bring this shark much-deserved respect.

"This species is completely overlooked, and only a few scientists in the world are working with this species," Nielsen said.

"Our findings show that even though the uncertainty is great that they should be considered the oldest vertebrate animal in the world," Nielsen added.

Nielsen said the vertebrate with the longest-known lifespan until now was the bowhead whale, topping 200 years.

Greenland sharks have a plump elongated body, round nose, relatively small dorsal fin, sandpaper-like skin and gray or blackish-brown coloration. They are slow swimmers and are nearly blind, but are capable hunters, eating fish, marine mammals and carrion.

They are known to be relatively abundant throughout the North Atlantic and Arctic, particularly from eastern Canada to western Russia. They occasionally are spotted by deep-sea robotic submarines at latitudes further south, such as in the Gulf of Mexico. They have been observed in depths down to 1.4 miles (2.2 km).

"They may widely inhabit the deep sea, potentially living anywhere water temperatures are below about 5 Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit)," said Australian Institute of Marine Science marine biologist Aaron MacNeil, who was not involved in the study.

MacNeil said the study did an admirable job of tackling a difficult matter but questioned an element of the dating analysis and said the estimate of a roughly 392-year-old shark "seems high to me."

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Scientists believe they have discovered the oldest vertebrate animal on Earth: a female Greenland shark that lived to be nearly 400 years old.

The shark, which measures over 16 feet in length, lived for an estimated 392 years, but could have an age range between 272 to 512 years, according to research recently published in the journal Science.

The centuries old shark takes the title of longest-living vertebrate from a bowhead whale that was estimated to be 211 years old. Though the shark was probably born in the 17th century, she could have been born some time between 1501 and 1744, the BBC points out.

But that doesn't make the shark the oldest animal to have lived — that record is held by a clam named Ming, which lived to turn 507, The Guardian reports.

"Even with the lowest part of this uncertainty, 272 years, even if that is the maximum age, it should still be considered the longest-living vertebrate," said Mr Nielsen.

The study, led by biologists from the University of Copenhagen, used radiocarbon dating to find the ages of 28 deceased Greenland sharks, studying their lenses to determine their age. The species of shark is now the world’s longest-living vertebrate.

Here's what a Greenland shark looks like in action:

When they’re born, Greenland sharks measure 42 centimetres and grow at a rate of 1 centimetre each year. The largest sharks end up measuring over 16 feet long, while female sharks reach sexual maturity on their 150th birthday, the study found.

To find the sharks’ ages, scientists measured the carbon levels in the lenses of their eyes, and looked for carbon-14 — which entered the ocean in the 1960s in the wake of nuclear bomb testing from the mid-1950s — to figure out which sharks were born before and after that time, a Science article explains.

Then, the researchers compared their radiocarbon dating findings with the sharks' estimated growth patterns, to determine how long the sharks born before the 1960s lived.

"We had our expectations that we were dealing with an unusual animal, but I think everyone doing this research was very surprised to learn the sharks were as old as they were,” Julius Nielsen, the marine biologist from the University of Copenhagen who led the study, told the BBC.

Business Insider has contacted the Marine Biological Association for comment.

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If humans have any hope of living forever, we should probably take a hint from the dozens of other animals on Earth that far outpace our measly 71 years. These long-lived animals aren't limited to a particular species, either: Everything from certain types of fish to some tortoises thrive far beyond what we might consider a normal lifespan.

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A team of biologists just discovered a shark that lived for around 400 years. That's twice as long as giant tortoises. By the time the biologists measured the shark's age, it was already dead. However, it's an incredible discovery. And who knows? Perhaps it has a 400-year-old that's still swimming around somewhere.

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There are few places in the world where it's possible to find a baby great white shark.

We've known that nurseries for these mysterious and far-swimming creatures can be found off the coasts of South Africa, eastern Australia, and Southern California. Now, it looks like we can add a new location to the mix.

A team of researchers just tagged nine baby white sharks right off the coast of Long Island, which likely confirms that there's another nursery just outside of New York City.

The remarkable finding was the result of an expedition that included scientists from shark research group Ocearch, the Wildlife Conservation Society, NOAA Fisheries, and several other institutions.

They had reason to think there might be a nursery in the region.

"Researchers and fishermen have been sporadically reporting the presence of small white sharks from the waters off Long Island for many decades," Tobey Curtis, a shark scientist with NOAA Fisheries, tells Business Insider via email. "It’s the only place on the coast with such a high concentration of baby white shark observations. But this was the first real focused research effort to tag them."

"This Long Island site is very special, and it’s amazing to me that these sharks appear to be thriving in the shadows of one of the biggest cities in the world," he says.

If the sharks spend a lot of time in the area, which seems likely as it's the only North Atlantic spot where so many newborn white sharks have been found, then this is likely the nursery habitat for the sharks. Curtis says it's likely the pups are born close by as well.

Curtis's research was one of the main factors that led the team to believe there might be a nursery in the Long Island area. As he told WNYC, he'd scoured records from the past 200 years and found that almost all the baby great whites seen in the North Atlantic in the past 200 years were spotted right off the Long Island coast, where there's a contentinental shelf, shallow water, and plenty of food.

Ocearch's GPS tagging system helps researchers (or anyone interested!) follow the sharks after they've been tagged. As you can see on their site, many of the newly tagged pups are still right in the area, swimming up and down the coast. This is probably a good point to mention that these baby sharks are not a threat to humans — they're too small for that, and most people really have nothing to fear from sharks.

In May, a rather-famous adult female white shark named Mary Lee that Ocearch had previously tagged returned to the New York area, which was another indicator that the region was a promising nursery site.

Now that the new juveniles have been tagged, the fascinating thing will be to watch what they do next. Curtis tells Business Insider that they expect that the pups will leave after temperatures drop this fall — the curious thing will be to see if they come back next summer.

"I think the most noteworthy findings are yet to come, as we follow the tracks of these white sharks over the next several years," he says. "These are the first baby white sharks to be tagged in the North Atlantic and we have no idea what to expect."

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Riding a motorboat can be fun. But riding one that can dive underwater and jump out of it 20 feet high is exhilarating. A recreational boat manufacturing company, Innespace Productions, has created a watercraft that can leap out of the water just like a killer whale.

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It looks like something out of a horror movie, with two dead eyes peering out of a pale patchwork of flesh, but that's a perfectly happy 'ghost shark' — otherwise known as a spookfish — cruising about in the deep sea off the coast of California.

The species, which features retractable sex organs on its forehead, has never been seen on film before.

The individual has been identified by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) as Hydrolagus cf. trolli — known commonly as the pointy-nosed blue chimaera.

The "cf." in its species name indicates that its physical characteristics closely match the official species description for Hydrolagus trolli, but without DNA evidence, they can't be sure.

In fact, there's also the possibility that this isn't just the first ever footage of a live Hydrolagus trolli — it could be showing us an entirely new species of ghost shark.

But because these fish are usually too large, fast, and agile to be caught by deep-sea roving vehicles, it's going to be incredibly difficult to find out for sure.

"If and when the researchers can get their hands on one of these fish, they will be able to make detailed measurements of its fins and other body parts and perform DNA analysis on its tissue,"Kim Fulton-Bennett from MBARI explains.

"This would allow them to either remove the cf. from their species description, or assign the fish to a new species altogether."

The footage was captured by an autonomous rover in the Gulf of California back in 2009, and researchers have only just released it to the public.

The creature is a chimera— an order of deep-sea fish that split off from sharks in the evolutionary tree nearly 400 million years ago, and has remained isolated ever since.

Chimaeras live on the ocean floor at depths of up to 2,600 metres (8,500 ft), and they have a permanent set of 'tooth plates' to grind their prey into pieces, unlike the conveyer belt of replaceable teeth found in sharks.

But perhaps their most creepy characteristic are the deep grooves cut into their flesh that make them look like something a serial killer stitched together:

In reality, those grooves are called lateral line canals, and they form a system of open channels on the heads and faces of ghost sharks.

They're thought to contain sensory cells that help these creatures detect movement in the pitch-black water.

You can see another view of them here, including the rows of dots that are also thought to be tiny sensory organs:

Until now, the pointy-nosed blue chimaera has only ever been identified in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, particularly around Australia, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, from specimens dredged up in fishing nets.

This new footage now suggests that the species has a much wider range than anyone had expected, and hints that it could range even further away from its known haunts have made researchers hopeful that it's not rare — just good at hiding.

"Similar looking, but as yet unidentified, ghost sharks have also been seen off the coasts of South America and Southern Africa, as well as in the Indian Ocean,"Fulton-Bennett reports.

"If these animals turn out to be the same species as the ghost sharks recently identified off California, it will be further evidence that, like many deep-sea animals, the pointy-nosed blue chimaera can really get around."

The sighting has been described in Marine Biodiversity Letters.

You can see more footage of a ghost shark below — this species has a distinctive purple hue, and a serious parasite problem:

SEE ALSO: Dozens of strange and fascinating new species were recently discovered in a Southeast Asia jungle

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Original reporting by Kevin Loria, Dragan Radovanovic.

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Ex-tropical cyclone Debbie has left its mark on Queensland after making landfall on Tuesday.

Thousands of residents have had their homes ruined. Other are without power.

Destructive winds have seen electricity towers crumbled and bent in half.

And the threat of flash flooding has closed schools in the state’s south east for two consecutive days.

To top it off, sharks are washing up on inland roads.

These photos were shared earlier by Queensland Fire & Emergency on Thursday:

It appears a bull shark washed up in Ayr, 13km from the coast.

“Think it’s safe to go back in the water? Think again!” the government department tweeted.

It’s not the first time a shark has being blown inland during a cyclone.

Following the 2011 Ipswich floods two bull sharks were spotted swimming past a McDonald’s restaurant in the town of Goodna.

They at least were still in the water.

Straya.

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