Searching for Mary Lee!

Mary Lee, a great white shark tagged with a GPS tracking device, has become a favorite of the social media set. All it took was a Twitter Account, (@MaryLeeShark) and an anonymous spokesperson to field responses to questions like this. “Mary Lee, I know it’s not polite, but how old are you?” Mary Lee’s answer, “Fifty, give or take a few decades”. Another tweet, “I’m following @MaryLeeShark, and hope she doesn’t follow me back.”

Since being tagged off Cape Cod in September, 2012, Mary Lee has traveled more than 20,000 miles up and down the Atlantic Coast. One of her favorite places to visit is the low country of South Carolina where she spent time in St. Helena Sound in 2013, and was spotted off Charleston’s coast again in January, 2014. Mary Lee also frequents the coast of New England, which has a history of apex shark sightings. Most recently, she was tracked while cruising the Maryland/Virginia coastline near Chincoteague Bay.

Where Mary Lee will go next is anybody’s guess, but now that she has 67,000 followers on twitter journeys, she will not go unnoticed.

Great white sharks can grow to over twenty feet in length and a weigh in excess of 7,000 pounds. They travel the seven seas and achieve speeds of thirty-five miles an hour when chasing prey. Their ancestry dates back 400 million years, and they can live sixty years or more. Their favorite foods are seals and sea lions, but any sea creature or bird is fair game. While humans are not a preferred prey, a large number of attacks are credited to them.

Tips from Capt. Gus: You can track Mary Lee and other apex sharks at: www.ocearch.org/tracker/.