- A frozen porbeagle shark washed up on the beach in Dennis, Massachusetts.
- Local photographer Amie Medeiros captured the creature in an Instagram post.
- A local aquarium scientist went to find the shark days later and said people had taken parts of it.
A porbeagle shark — a species known for living in colder waters — turned up frozen on a Cape Cod beach following a polar vortex that swept through Northeastern states.
Local photographer Amie Medeiros captured a picture of the shark on Saturday afternoon, lying sideways while preserved in the ice around it.
Medeiros posted the photo with a passage from writer Haruki Murakami’s book “Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow.”
“Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they’re alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way – cleanly, clearly. That’s the essence of ice, the role it plays.”
John Chisholm, an adjunct scientist at the New England Aquarium who has been tracking sharks washing up onshore, confirmed that it was a porbeagle shark.
“Pretty sure this is one that originally washed up last week and has been moving around with the big tides,” Chisholm wrote on Twitter.
Chisholm tweeted a picture of the shark on Monday after it had thawed, noting that the tail, dorsal fin, pectoral fin, and teeth had been taken.
—MA Sharks 🦈 (@MA_Sharks) February 6, 2023
Over the last week, the Northeast has been experiencing sub-zero temperatures. In Cape Cod, temperatures reached as low as 30 degrees below zero on Friday night — the day before Medeiros’ photo was taken, local outlet CapeCod.com reported.
The local outlet also noted that the shark had an injury on its side.
Greg Skomal, a marine biologist at Boston University, told USA Today that the deterioration of the sharks body would make it challenging to determine exactly how the shark died.
