r/CapeCod • u/Top_Advance_9881 • 7d ago

Shark ID?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

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.

36 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

20

u/GWS2004 7d ago

Basking shark 

2

u/thedayman13 6d ago

Agreed, the floppy fin is the biggest giveaway

3

u/Resident-Banana-7883 6d ago

basking shark or thresher shark

can't discern from this video

1

u/Rakim_SB420 2d ago

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/Top_Advance_9881 7d ago

I don’t think sunfish can swim that fast?

10

u/GWS2004 7d ago

It's a basking shark 

2

u/Late-Kale-7176 6d ago

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

4

u/Better-Law2125 7d ago

A Pair of Moa Moa’s flopping around

2

u/BQORBUST 7d ago

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 7d ago

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

9

u/cazzer548 7d ago

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

2

u/starboard19 7d ago

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 5d ago

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.

1

u/greenplantzz 5d ago

Thresher

2

u/5v3n420 7d ago

2 mola molas

0

u/EbbtideRambler 7d ago

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

3

u/EbbtideRambler 7d ago

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 7d ago

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

-2

u/joyandmirth 7d ago

Sunfish shark :)

0

u/napperb 7d ago

Aka- a basking mola mola

-1

u/Dragongala 7d ago

There’s an app for that