Maine shark sightings remind us to move with the times

Lindsay L. Graff is a Ph.D. candidate at the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Over the summer, a succession of white shark sightings unfolded along the Maine coast. A juvenile white shark closed Wells Beach to swimming, warning flags rose in Biddeford, and in Scarborough a lifeguard was pulled beneath the surface when a shark seized his rescue float. In Frenchman Bay, lifelong Mainer John DeRaps watched a white shark feeding on a seal and wrote, 'I've been on the water my whole life and I have never seen a great white.' His surprise is understandable, for generations of New Englanders inherited a coastline stripped of much of the wildness that once defined it, where encounters with large predators had become so uncommon that their absence began to feel natural. Yet a lifetime without seeing a white shark tells us less about what these waters are supposed to look like and more about how profoundly we had already altered them. What feels jarringly unfamiliar in Maine is not entirely new to New England. Massachusetts has spent more than a decade watching gray seals repopulate its coast and white sharks follow them into nearshore waters. The coastline familiar to us today is only a fragment of a much older ecological history, in which gray seals occupied these shores for thousands of years and white sharks were documented in Maine as early as 1872. Centuries of seal hunting culminated in state-funded bounty programs, driven by the contention that seals competed with fishermen for valuable fish. As the seals vanished, so did the predictable concentrations of coastal prey that make these elusive predators so visible to us today. Sightings that once might have vanished into an ephemeral network of fishermen's tales can now become videos and headlines within hours. The return of these seal aggregations now gives scientists rare opportunities to study one of the ocean's top predators, revealing chapters of their lives once hidden from us. Advertisement The ocean that lives within human memory is not the ocean against which recovery should be measured. A New England fisher beginning a 50-year career in 1976 entered the Gulf of Maine only three years after a survey counted roughly 30 gray seals along the entire Maine coast. Those memories are not wrong, but they simply begin too late. Against that ecological absence, we built our modern relationship with the coast, shaped by swimming, boating, fishing and the expectation that we could enter the ocean largely free from the predators that once shared these waters. Those expectations took root in a profoundly diminished ecosystem, allowing us to mistake an ocean emptied of much of its wildness for safety and our freedom to enter it for a right to claim it. In reality, the relationship we built with the sea rested upon one of its least representative versions, a fragile illusion of what the ocean should be. The irony is that changes now unsettling many coastal communities are the very outcomes decades of ocean conservation and fisheries management were designed to achieve. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 helped seals recover and recolonize, while broader protections and management helped restore more of the ecological web around them. As some of that lost abundance returns to the coast, so do the predators woven into it, bringing them closer to shore and into clearer view. At the same time, more people are swimming, boating, fishing, photographing and documenting the ocean than ever before, creating a paradox in which greater visibility can easily be mistaken for 'invasion.' White sharks, however, are not suddenly 'infesting' waters where they do not belong. Their presence reflects a food web knitting itself back together along coastlines where generations of depletion had split it apart. White sharks are once again moving through waters that have long been part of their history, forcing us to confront an uncomfortable truth: our expectation that we should be able to swim, surf and fish these waters without fear or competition was built during an ecological absence we mistook for normality. We created an illusion of what a healthy ocean should look like, then blamed the very animals we spent decades protecting when their recovery shattered it. That reaction is troublingly familiar because the same belief that seals and other predators were taking 'our' fish, occupying 'our' waters and competing for resources we believed belonged exclusively to us helped empty these coastlines in the first place. If conservation is followed by resentment the moment wildlife inconveniences us, we have not escaped that history, we have simply begun repeating it. The ocean has never promised to remain static for our convenience. Its waters warm, species shift and food webs rebuild, and our relationship with it must shift too. None of us knows from lived experience what a healthy ocean is supposed to look like, because the baseline we inherited was already depleted. As the ecosystem rebuilds, what emerges may look unfamiliar, inconvenient and at times uncomfortable to us, but it has no obligation to resemble the illusion we constructed from that absence or conform to expectations formed while so much of its wildness was missing. If a healthy ocean looks unfamiliar, perhaps it is because we have spent generations mistaking a diminished one for the way the sea was meant to be.