Experts looking for great white shark carcass that washed up on Cape Breton beach
Dead animal has since washed back out to sea
Marine animal experts are trying to locate the carcass of a great white shark that was found on a Cape Breton beach on Thursday, but has since washed back to sea.
They're hoping an examination will reveal the shark's cause of death and provide insights into great white shark populations in the Maritimes.
Earlier on Thursday a shark was sighted behaving erratically near a wharf in Ingonish, Victoria County. Videos and photographs of the shark show it swimming around the wharf and, at one point, banging into it.
The body of a great white shark washed up on a beach a few kilometres away in Broad Cove at Cape Breton Highlands National Park later that day.
Tonya Wimmer, the executive director of Marine Animal Response Society, said her organization and federal officials they work with had planned to collect the carcass Friday but it washed out to sea before they had a chance to retrieve it.
She said the dead shark would have been taken to the wildlife pathologist at the Atlantic Veterinary College.
Shark was male
Wimmer said all they can tell from photos and video is that the shark was male.
"They have very distinctive claspers down by their tail end. But at the moment that's all we know, not even having an accurate length measurement to ...better fine tune the age or the weight of the animal," she said.
"With a full necropsy you can get a wide range of information from the point of view of just biological information."
She said great white sharks are rare in Nova Scotia so tests on the animal could provide valuable genetic and other information.
The animal seen swimming earlier and the dead shark seen on the beach are likely the same animal, Wimmer said.
She noted that in both sightings the shark had a distinctive dorsal fin that "flopped over"
Wimmer said they have put out a call for anyone who might see the body that floated away to let MARS know.
Appears to be juvenile
Aaron MacNeil, a biology professor at Dalhousie University, said the shark was a juvenile judging from its size and photos.
He said juvenile great white sharks mainly eat fish but as they get larger they switch to feeding on seals.
MacNeil said other similar sharks have washed up dead in recent months on the California coast with no signs of trauma or starvation.
"The current theory is that they get these sort of brain infections ... bacterial infection and it causes all kinds of problems and eventually death," MacNeil said.
'If it is the same animal. And I believe fishermen, they can size an animal and know if it is the same animal, then it's probably what happened."
MacNeil said white sharks, commonly known as great white sharks, are endangered in Canada and their population declined by over 90 per cent in the first part of the 20th century.
He said protections were put in place in the 1990s and their population is slowly recovering.
Their low reproductive rates means it will take them a long time to rebuild populations, MacNeil said.
Wimmer said having a dead great white shark or parts of it is illegal and she is encouraging anyone who sees the dead shark to call 1-866-567-6277 immediately.
With files from Amy Smith