Who says people don’t like sharks? Beachgoers in shark territory showed extraordinary compassion when a full grown adult great white shark beached itself in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
With the beach crowded at the time due to the busy Labor Day weekend, dozens of people responded to the 14-foot shark stranded in the shorepound. They dug a holding pool and a trench to funnel water to the shark, which apparently beached during low tide.
Stephen Werke filmed the scene and provided the footage to CNN iReport.
“We walked down there and the first thing I noticed was a shark’s fin,” the freelance photographer told the network. “It was a pretty massive great white shark. People at the time were just shuffling back and forth pouring buckets of water into a little moat they had built to keep the shark cool.”
After completing the canal, several beachgoers physically dragged the shark back into the water, but despite their best efforts the shark did not survive, the Boston Glob reports.
Greg Skomal, a shark expert with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, told the paper the shark likely washed up on the beach alive after failing to navigate the shallows. Skomal performed a necropsy on the shark after it went belly-up and determined that it probably died when it was on shore. The 2,000 pound shark suffered internal bleeding from the its own weight, he said.
“There’s only so much you can do — it’s a fish out of water,” Skomal said. “They’re basically drowning.”
Great white shark stranded on beach
Dozens of beachgoers rushed to rescue a stranded great white shark in Cape Cod. While the crowd managed to pull the shark back into the ocean, it was too late, according to reports. http://cnn.it/1M6nlds
Posted by CNN iReport on Monday, September 7, 2015
Photo credit: Dreamstime
