Beaches in New York Start Patrolling Sharks in Hope of Stopping Attacks that May Not Come.

By: Bryan Li

New York beaches are adopting strategies to track and patrol sharks, according to The New York Times. Experts, however, maintain that the whole thing is nearly useless because “the danger to people is infinitesimal.”

New York beaches are starting to patrol sharks via lifeguards on jet skis. As lifeguard Justine Anderson says, “It’s become part of our daily routine.” Anderson also claims that prior to when the patrols started, seeing a shark on the public beaches was extremely rare.

According to The New York Times, several beaches in New York which include Long Beach, Smith Point, and East Hampton and others have started using jet skis and drones to keep a lookout for sharks. Of course, all this new caution toward sharks annoys experts who claim that sharks do not pose a danger to humans, or so The New York Times says.

Experts like Hans Walters, a field scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium, says that the situation about sharks is “way overblown.” He also claims that a shark’s threat to people is very nearly nonexistent, and that there are only around a dozen documented shark attacks in New York for the last few centuries, and that most of them were accidental injuries.

However, the amount of sharks in local waters have increased, and that it’s because water temperatures have increased so the sharks have been going to the colder water nearer to land. Chris Stefanou, a fisherman in Long Island, says that “There are more and more sharks in the water, which sounds scary, but it’s actually a good thing because it reflects a healthy ecosystem.