OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND- This past weekend, a gigantic adult female great white shark passed south along the Jersey Shore and is now making its way into the vicinity of Ocean City, Maryland. Her name is Nukumi and she’s 17′ 2″ long, weighing in at 3,541 pounds. She’s one of many sharks being tracked by Ocearch and the largest shark to ping off the Mid-Atlantic shoreline since Mary Lee in 2017.
Nukumi was tagged by researches off the coast of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia on October 20th and she’s been making her way south since. Last Wednesday and Thursday she made her trip around the Massachusetts Cape and Nantucket before being spotted again Friday night, south of Nantucket.
On Saturday she had made her way south, off the coast of New Jersey, east of Ortley Beach, which was ground zero for Superstorm Sanday in 2012. On Wednesday, she appeared again, this time about 50 miles off the coast of Ocean City Maryland near Chincoteague heading in a northwesterly path.
The last large great white shark to pass the Jersey Shore coastline of this size was Mary Lee, a 16 foot, 3,456 pound female. Mary Lee last ping for Ocearch on June 17, 2017 off the coast of Long Beach Island, New Jersey.
“Nukumi, pronounced noo-goo-mee, is named after the legendary wise old grandmother figure of the Native American Mi’kmaq people, a culture that has deep roots in Canadian Maritime provinces (particularly Nova Scotia),” Ocearch said. “With the new data we’ve collected, this matriarch will share her wisdom with us for years to come. She will continue to help balance fish stocks in the surrounding waters, and we look forward to learning more from this wise guardian of our ocean’s eco-system.”