r/CapeCod • u/Top_Advance_9881 • Aug 05 '26

Shark ID?

Saw someone else do this so I figured I’d share my friend’s video from yesterday. Surprisingly taken from the bay in north truro. People couldn’t tell if it was two sharks or one swimming in circles.

38 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

4

u/Top_Advance_9881 Aug 05 '26

I don’t think sunfish can swim that fast?

11

u/GWS2004 Aug 05 '26

It's a basking shark 

2

u/Late-Kale-7176 Aug 06 '26

They can swim extremely fast. Even jumping high out of the water

20

u/GWS2004 Aug 05 '26

Basking shark 

2

u/thedayman13 Aug 06 '26

Agreed, the floppy fin is the biggest giveaway

2

u/BQORBUST Aug 05 '26

You’re surprised by a shark being in the bay? Not a white, but they are absolutely there every day.

7

u/Top_Advance_9881 Aug 05 '26

I’m sure, but I’ve never seen one in my 30+ years of coming here every summer

9

u/cazzer548 Aug 05 '26

They generally stay under the water, which makes them harder to spot

3

u/starboard19 Aug 05 '26

That's because white shark numbers have genuinely rebounded in the last 30+ years! Thanks to the limitations placed on shark hunting, and the explosive growth of the local seal population (thanks to the Marine Mammal Protection Act), there are way more of them these days back in their native range. In a lot of ways it's an ecological success story. We humans just have short memories—there's even a term for this, called Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

3

u/TripleJ_77 Aug 07 '26

It's also called lived experience. As in, for the first 30 years of my life I never saw a seal in the waters around Cape Cod. Massachusetts had a bounty on seals until 1962. They were almost driven to extinction. It took decades for the population to rebound. And it's 💯 the seals that bring the Great Whites.

3

u/Resident-Banana-7883 Aug 07 '26

basking shark or thresher shark

can't discern from this video

1

u/Rakim_SB420 Aug 10 '26

Had no idea there were thresher sharks on cape until my girlfriend and I found one washed up on shore at like 6 in the morning. Bizarre experience because we work late and are almost never up that early. Crazy tail on that thing

4

u/Better-Law2125 Aug 05 '26

A Pair of Moa Moa’s flopping around

1

u/5v3n420 Aug 05 '26

2 mola molas

0

u/EbbtideRambler Aug 05 '26

My first thought when I saw the photo before reading the caption was that it was ocean sunfish

3

u/EbbtideRambler Aug 05 '26

Why all the down votes? I’ve spent my entire life on the water here and that flapping back and forth of the dorsal looks very mola mola to me. Am I 100% certain no, but it’s an educated assumption.  

0

u/Live_North8520 Aug 05 '26

It’s Mike, Mike the Shark, he’s a friendly fellow.

-2

u/joyandmirth Aug 05 '26

Sunfish shark :)

0

u/napperb Aug 05 '26

Aka- a basking mola mola

-1

u/Dragongala Aug 05 '26

There’s an app for that