A basking shark measuring roughly 20 feet long was found dead in Blue Hill on Wednesday, possibly after getting stuck close to shore when the tide receded.
Its body was found near Blue Hill Falls earlier on Wednesday. By 6 p.m., it was still in the area just south of the falls.
As the tide receded Wednesday afternoon, the shark’s body was draped over seaweed-covered rocks a few yards offshore. Spots of blood floated in the water nearby as its fins hung limp and its mouth was agape.
Pam Heilner, who lives nearby, said her husband Marc Heilner found the dead shark on the shore near their house at around 7 a.m. Wednesday.
“He said ‘there’s something big in the water,’” she said.
The whale carcass already was showing some signs of wear early Wednesday evening, but some of that may have been caused by people in small boats who maneuvered to get a close look, Heilner said.
She said she had gotten calls from marine research organizations who asked her about the shark and said they wanted to examine it. Messages to those organizations to confirm their interest in conducting a necropsy were not immediately returned Wednesday evening.
There have been reports in recent days of a basking shark swimming lethargically in shallow water at Swan’s Island and in Blue Hill but it wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday if the dead shark was the same animal that had been seen alive earlier.
“Oh, it stinks!” said a woman who had found the shark carcass Wednesday evening after looking for it from a boat coasting along the shore.
Staff of the Shaw Institute, a marine research center in Blue Hill, were able to locate the shark midday Wednesday after receiving reports about it, according to Executive Director and Senior Research Scientist Charles Rolsky. The researchers planned to go back in the evening to see if they could take samples of its tissue to help determine why it died, but Rolsky said that might not be possible based on the amount of decomposition that can occur in one day.
Basking sharks are the second largest shark in the world after whale sharks, measuring up to 40 feet long and weighing as much as six tons. However, they’re generally not considered dangerous to people, feeding on small fish, krill and other food by filtering thousands of tons of water through their gills every day.
While there are a few reasons why the animal may have died, Rolsky said his guess was that the shark had come towards shore to follow a source of food, then gotten stranded as the tide receded. He pointed to the video that was shared around social media on Tuesday night, in which a shark appeared to be swimming in shallow water off Blue Hill.
“It looked like it was in distress,” Rolsky said. “We hoped it being kind of stuck in the water would correlate with it having somewhere to go, but unfortunately we heard earlier today that it passed away.”
BDN writer Charles Eichacker contributed reporting.
