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SHARK BEACHING ON LONG ISLAND! - JULY 14th, 2009 -

On July 14 a 20-foot-long shark washed ashore in Gilgo State Park in the area, generally used only by the folks with 4-wheel drive permits. The huge fish appeared to have died from illness because there were no obvious signs of trauma. Tracy Marcus from the Sportfishing Center at Cedar Beach estimated the shark’s weight at a Ton. She said that its death near or on the shore was unusual because they generally die in deeper waters.

The basking shark, Cetorhinus Maximus, is the second largest fish, after the whale shark, in the sea.
It spends most of its time at the surface of the water, giving it the nickname, “Sunfish”.
Other nicknames include: bone shark, elephant shark, sailfish shark, and big mouth shark.
The latter nickname comes from its habit of swimming around with its mouth wide open.

It has an impressively large mouth which it uses to collect tiny morsels that float in the water.
It is filter-feeder, having tightly-set, bristle-like gill rakers to sieve small animals and other food from the water.
As it swims, mouth agape, huge amounts of water filled with prey flow through its mouth.
After closing its mouth, it’s the gill rakers that filter the nourishment from the water.
This shark does have hundreds of teeth, each with a single point curving backwards, which are tiny and of little use.
The basking shark’s diet includes plankton, baby fish and fish eggs.

Basking sharks live in warm coastal and cool temperate waters.
Often seen in surface waters in the summer and fall, there had long been a mystery about their winter quarters until, using satellite-tagging,
researchers found that they make long migrations through the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean, going to depths of 600 to 3,000 feet.
They may even stay at those depths for weeks at a time.
And, it is believed that they shed their gill-rakers in the winter and regrow them in the following spring.

Basking sharks are slow swimmers, about 3 miles per hour, as they swim by moving their entire bodies from side to side. These sluggish swimmers have huge gills, which extend around the top and bottom of their heads, and dark gill rakers. They are a mottled grayish-brown in color. Their snouts are short and conical. Their tail fins are crescent shaped and strongly keeled. Female basking sharks can grow to 33 feet long males, which are smaller, up to 30 feet long. They can weigh up to 4 tons. Despite their impressive size, they are not aggressive and usually not harmful to people.

Despite recent discoveries about the basking shark, not much is known about its reproduction process and birthing location.
It is believed that the female basking shark reaches sexual maturity when it is about 13 feet long.
She gives birth to live pups which are about 5 to 6 feet long.
Basking sharks have been observed swimming is small schools, nose to tail in circles, in what some believe to be a mating behavior.

While basking sharks are fairly common warm-weather inhabitants of the waters off Long Island,
they are listed by the International Union For Conservation of Nature as, “Vulnerable to Extinction.

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