Study in Saco Bay aims to fill data gaps about juvenile white sharks
A biology professor from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is studying juvenile white sharks who come close to Maine’s coast, at a time when there have been multiple sightings near a beach in Scarborough.
“Is this an anomaly, or are these animals becoming residents of your coastal waters?” Diego Bernal said in an interview Friday.
His study is focused on Saco Bay, working primarily from Old Orchard Beach and Scarborough. Rumors swirled on social media this week that he and his colleagues were chumming, or throwing fish parts in the water to attract the predatory species.
That allegation is not true, Bernal said. They are fishing with bait on a hook.
“We don’t attract them,” he said. “We don’t chum. We’re really not doing anything that’s abnormal.”
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Jeff Nichols, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said the project has a special license from the state that comes with certain regulations. The researchers notify Maine Marine Patrol and local municipalities before fishing takes place, he said.
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Bernal said this year is the first for the study. He said he did not want to duplicate the efforts of other scientists who are tagging sharks from boats, and he felt the best way to study the ones that come close to shore would be to catch them from the sand.
“Our goal is to tag 30 juvenile white sharks in that area to see what they do, where they go, how long they stay and do they come back next year,” Bernal said.
The researchers work only from sundown to sunrise, he said, and not on weekends. People are rarely in the water during those hours, but if they are, the team suspends its research. Bernal said the process is similar to fishing for striped bass, just with bigger gear. They drop a line about 300 yards off shore and just wait. The hook is baited with a piece of bluefin tuna or another oily fish.
If they catch a shark, he said, they bring it into shallow water, quickly measure the animal, determine its sex, document its markings with photographs, take a biological sample and attach a tag to the back of the dorsal fin. Bernal said the whole process takes less than two minutes.
“We do not want to harm the animals, so we don’t do anything that delays their release,” Bernal said. “We work really fast.”
Bernal said the crews have gone out on four nights since mid-July. Three were unsuccessful, but on Tuesday, they tagged two sharks.
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The crew has informational pamphlets to give to the public, he said, and is ready to answer questions about their work.
“Our first concern is public safety,” Bernal said.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others have been tagging white sharks for more than a decade.
Starting in 2020, Nichols said, scientists from the Maine Department of Marine Resources have been placing acoustic receivers off the coast in the spring. They retrieve them in the winter to analyze the data.
In 2025, the state placed 36 passive receiver sites from Ogunquit Beach to the Canadian border, according to an annual report. The receivers in Maine detected 19 unique white sharks across 95 dates during the 2025 season, bringing the cumulative number detected in this survey to 105 since 2020.
As of last year, approximately 300 white sharks are carrying acoustic tags, the report said. Only four were tagged in Maine. In both 2024 and 2025, the most active sharks in the state had also been tagged here.
“This trend may indicate a potential difference in residency patterns between white sharks tagged elsewhere and smaller juveniles tagged locally, though further research is required to confirm,” the report said.
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Tagged: maine beaches, sharks
Megan Gray covers the outdoors and tourism at the Portland Press Herald. A Midwest native, she moved to Maine in 2016. She has written about presidential politics and local government, jury trials and. More by Megan Gray
Penny is excited to be the Portland Press Herald’s first climate reporter. Since joining the paper in 2016, she has written about Maine’s lobster and cannabis industries, covered state politics and. More by Penelope Overton
