Two Whale Sharks Surfaced Off New York City. The Last Confirmed Sighting Was in 1935.
Two whale sharks, each estimated at roughly 20 tons, surfaced alongside a Brooklyn-based tour boat on Monday about 100 miles off the coast of New York City, in what naturalists are calling the first confirmed sighting of the species in the area in nine decades. Passengers aboard the American Princess, on a 24-hour wildlife trip into the Hudson Canyon, watched one of the sharks approach the vessel’s port side closely enough to be filmed at close range.
Chris St. Lawrence, a naturalist with American Princess Cruises who also works with the research group Gotham Whale, filmed the encounter and described it as a genuinely rare event. “It’s pretty rare to see from a boat because they live their whole lives underneath the surface, so they can be hard to see and it’s so difficult to get out there,” St. Lawrence said. The last widely documented whale shark sighting in the region dates to August 1935, when a 32-foot shark was caught by commercial fishermen near Fire Island Inlet.
Why the sighting matters extends beyond its rarity. The encounter took place in Hudson Canyon, a deep-sea gorge roughly 100 miles southeast of the city that is currently under consideration for designation as a National Marine Sanctuary. Whale sharks, despite their size, are filter feeders with no interest in humans, and they remain listed as endangered worldwide, facing threats from ship strikes and a warming climate that is shifting the range of many highly migratory species. Naturalists on the trip attributed the sighting to the Gulf Stream, which periodically pushes warm, clear tropical water into the canyon, temporarily turning it into a feeding ground for species that would not otherwise venture this far north.
That same warm-water influence has drawn other unusual visitors to the region this year, including a lone orca spotted off Montauk. The whale shark sighting also arrived within weeks of another milestone: Gotham Whale confirmed in August that it had documented its 500th individual humpback whale in the waters surrounding New York City’s five boroughs, a tally built over more than a decade of tracking whales by their unique tail markings.
Researchers are careful not to overstate what a single sighting proves. One encounter, however striking, is not evidence of a broader shift in whale shark range or behavior on its own. What it does confirm, naturalists say, is how much deep-ocean life moves through Hudson Canyon’s waters largely unseen, a point that carries particular weight given the active debate over whether the canyon should receive federal sanctuary protection.
For the passengers aboard the American Princess, the science took a back seat to the moment itself. St. Lawrence said the water was clear enough that everyone aboard could make out the sharks’ distinctive spotted pattern, the same markings researchers use to identify individual whale sharks. One passenger’s reaction, caught on video, summed up the mood: “That was nuts.”
Sources: Hudson Valley Post, CBS News
