With Florida Attacks Fresh, a Dead Shark Lands on Far Rockaway
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The lifeless body of a baby blue shark washed up on a beach in Far Rockaway yesterday, officials of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation said. The discovery came on the heels of two violent shark attacks off the Florida Panhandle, which left a 14-year-old girl dead and a 16-year-old boy severely injured.
Though parks officials said it was the first time in recent history that a shark had appeared on one of the city’s Rockaway beaches, a fishing boat captain from eastern Long Is land said it was not a major incident.
“It’s no big deal,” Raymond Ruddock, who owns a 37-foot boat, Abracadabra, in Montauk, said. “Out here, we see them all the time.”
The Web site of the Canadian Museum of Nature says the blue shark, which sometimes can grow to more than 10 feet long and 400 pounds, “is not reputed to be particularly dangerous to humans.”
However, Mr.Ruddock, 61, said, “One minute you can be playing with it and the next it turns around and bites you.”
Blue sharks give birth in the shallow areas near the shore, he said. At birth the offspring generally are between 18 and 24 inches. After spending a year learning to fend for itself in the safer, shallow waters, the shark goes out into the ocean and follows the currents, Mr. Ruddock said. Yesterday’s shark measured 5 to 6 feet in length, parks officials said.
A park patrol officer, Sergeant Jamie Lilley, discovered the shark about 2:15 p.m. on a routine patrol of a beach that was closed for the day, officials said. At a nearby city facility, a Parks Department expert and a marine biologist from the New York Aquarium later identified it as a male blue shark.
Mr. Ruddock, the fishing boat captain, said the shark was probably caught by a local fisherman and then thrown back inyo the ocean because blue sharks aren’t edible. The blue shark has a bitter taste and a strong smell of ammonia, because it secretes urine through its skin, he said.
Sightings of sharks, including blue sharks, increase in the summer months because the water temperature increases, he said.
Yesterday’s finding could augur more: The Canadian museum’s Web site says blue sharks can have litters of up to 70 pups.
