A monster 450kg great white shark nicknamed ‘Ironbound’ has been located lurking in sea off the coast of New Jersey.
The monster fish was caught on navigation systems swimming northbound on April 28, in an attempt to get to more plentiful feeding grounds, possibly as far as Canada.
Researchers from Ocearch are keeping a close eye on the potential killer as it migrates with a harmless tag, that falls off after a few years.
“Mating season is over, we think, and Ironbound is on his way north to get into some good feeding ground and bulk up again for the next year,” Bob Hueter, chief scientist, Ocearch, told CNN.
The great white was tagged on October 3, 2019, off the coast of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia and has made its way thousands of miles south for the holiday season.
It was given its name as the shark was caught for the first time near West Ironbound Island, Nova Scotia.
The tracker has an error margin, meaning that the shark’s precise location could be off by quite a few metres.
“That error bar can be the difference between one side of Long Island and the other,” George Burgess, a marine biologist and director emeritus of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told Live Science in 2019.
Hueter told CNN that Ocearch has tagged great white sharks as long as 17.5 feet (5 m) and as heavy as 4,000 pounds (1,814 kg), meaning Ironbound is of a relatively modest size.
Ironbound has traveled an estimated 13,000 miles since he was first tagged on his dorsal fin.
Most recently, he was spotted on May 3 when the adult male was much farther out in the Atlantic Ocean, due east of Philadelphia.
