If Steven Spielberg tried to make Jaws today, he’d have a tough time, especially now that the Massachusetts-based Atlantic Shark Conservancy has made it so much easier to track great white shark activity with a new app.
According to the Conservancy’s website, Sharktivity was “developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the Cape Cod National Seashore, and officials from Cape Cod and South Shore Towns.” The app is intended to “provide information on White Shark sightings, detections, movements, and research to raise awareness and help people and White Sharks co-exist peacefully.”
That peaceful co-existence has been an issue ever since Jaws premiered 41 years ago and the waters off Cape Cod became identified with the monster sharks. Those waters grow warmer at this time of the year, as the Associated Press reports, and great whites are beginning “to appear in earnest.”
Conservancy president Cynthia Wigren told the Cape Cod Times that Sharktivity isn’t meant to be an alarm or warning system, though. The app is intended to provide the public with “a sense of the activity rather than an alert system,” she said.
If you’re heading to the waters around the Cape or at least to the beaches and want that “sense” about what’s going on, download Sharktivity here. If Chief Brody from Jaws was real and around today we’re pretty sure it would already be on his phone.
h/t AP, Cape Cod Times