2 great white sharks tracked to Gulf of St. Lawrence

Two great whites have made their way to Quebec waters just in time for shark week.

A specimen named Jekyll was last pinged on Tuesday near the shores of Percé, on the tip of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Simon is also hanging out in the Gulf of St. Lawrence a little further inward.

Their voyages are being tracked by Ocearch, an American nonprofit that monitors the movements of Earth's ocean giants.

The organization has tagged hundreds of animals, including turtles, whales, dolphins and, of course, sharks.

Jekyll and Simon are still in their juvenile years, but you might not guess it by looking at them. Jekyll is eight feet eight inches tall and 395 pounds, while Simon is even bigger at nine feet six inches tall and 434 pounds. 

The pair were named after Jekyll and St. Simon's Islands, both in Georgia, where researchers first tagged them in December 2022.

The Ocearch map shows the great white shark Jekyll's journey towards the Gaspe Peninsula. (Ocearch)

Ocearch's map shows the young sharks travelling northward, cruising past the sights of Myrtle Beach, Atlantic City and Long Island before hitting Canadian waters around June of 2023.

After a brief detour around Nova Scotia, they took the Cabot Strait up to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

It's not the first time great whites have been spotted in Quebec; in 2019, a shark named Brunswick made headlines after he turned up near the Magdalen Islands, and four more sharks followed suit in 2020.  

CONSERVATION EFFORTS 

Fred Whoriskey, executive director of The Ocean Tracking Network, a global aquatic research, data management and partnership platform at Halifax's Dalhousie University, said recent conservation efforts explain how the two large fish ended up near Quebec.

"What's happening, we think, now is the population is growing, the animals that had pulled back to a southern distribution — mostly south of the Canadian border — are now beginning to occupy Canadian waters. We're beginning to see them much more frequently," he said in an interview.

Whoriskey said other measures have protected the sharks from dying off in cases of accidental kills when they get snagged in halibut or swordfish lines, for example.

"Now, we're protecting them from that kind of thing and they do seem to be bouncing back," he said.

Going for a dip in the St. Lawrence? Whoriskey offers these tips for what to do when encountering a shark:

• Don't panic — don't begin to flail or show other signs of panic that might excite attention
• Move backward — move toward a shallower end of the water, and hopefully out of the water
• Keep an eye on it — don't lose sight of the shark so that it can see that you're watching it 

"They are very cautious in what they're doing when they're attacking because they also can get hurt in this process," he said.