Unusual Sighting Washes Up on the Shore of Nantucket

It was a sad day on Friday when a tiger shark washed up dead on the shore of Nantucket.

Tiger sharks are rarely seen in the waters around Nantucket, especially this time of year, so what exactly happened to this lone shark?

Nantucket Current shared the “unusual and sad sight” on Twitter as beachgoers attempted to bring the shark ashore. Unfortunately, it was swept back out to sea.

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“We want to find this shark to do a necropsy and figure out what happened to it,” said researcher John Chisholm to the Boston Herald. “Did someone offshore catch it and release it? Did it travel north in a warm water eddy and then succumb to the cold waters?”

“If you find it, please let me know so we can perform a necropsy,” he said online. A Necropsy refers to a post-mortem examination of an animal species to determine the cause of death.

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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tiger sharks are highly migratory species that are typically found in tropical and temperate waters, and a recent study by NOAA and the University of Miami found that warming ocean waters had expanded the tiger sharks’ seasonal distribution in the northwest Atlantic.

With warmer waters, tiger shark sightings may increase this summer, but seeing one suffer was a sad sight this week.

More answers are needed to determine the cause of death of this unusual sighting.