Great white sharks shift northward to New England and Atlantic Canada

Great white sharks are spending more time in northern waters off New England and Atlantic Canada, a shift scientists attribute to abundant seal populations and longer, warmer seasons. New data show the predators moving farther north than in previous years, with Maine documenting dozens of sightings in 2024, and reports of increased activity along Cape Cod and in Canadian waters. The development is prompting both public safety measures and policy adjustments as coastal communities adapt to a coastline where encounters, while still rare, are increasingly visible.

In Maine, state researchers have been tracking white sharks in the Gulf of Maine since 2020. By the latest tallies, 93 individual sharks had been detected off Maine’s coast since monitoring began, with 19 unique sharks recorded in 2024 across 47 different dates. The expansion northward is echoed in Canadian water data, where detections near Halifax increased about 2.5 times from 2018 to 2022, and in the Cabot Strait between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where detections nearly quadrupled over the same period. Across the region, researchers note that several species of sharks share the northern Gulf of Maine with the...