Title: Best of 2025: NYC’s Shark Summer

Eureg Pinobi: Drones started spotting sharks off New York City beaches, and summer beach days came with a new kind of warning. This year, we looked at New York City sharks and how they got here from WNYC, this is NYC NOW. I'm Eureg Pinobi in Janae Pierre. This week, we're looking back at some of our favorite stories of 2025. One of those stories unfolded at the beach in July, back when the weather was hot, life was good, and the city started using drones to spot sharks in the water.

Well, the city spotted a lot of them, and New York City beaches closed several times. Back when this was all going down, our host, Janae Pierre, spoke with WNYC reporter Liam Quigley, who, among other things, covers the city's beaches, to get some clarity on what was actually happening. At the heart of it was a simple question. Are sharks actually showing up more frequently off New York City beaches, or are we just finally able to see what's been there all along?

Liam Quigley: It's probably mostly that we're really looking for them the past few years. The drones were not in the sky in 2019, 2020. You have people who are being paid to sit near the beach looking at a screen, feeding them video from a drone that's flying over the water. We didn't really have that before. Yes, the water in New York City harbor has gotten cleaner. That's attracting more bait fish that attract other sea life. That's a good thing. Frankly, it'd be weird if there were no sharks in the ocean, because that's where they live. We have people sitting there looking for these animals, and they're finding them.

Janae Pierre: Tell us about these drones. When did it all start?

Liam Quigley: They really took off with this program in a bigger way after the shark bite incident in 2023. On a given day at the Rockaways, you might have four teams from three separate agencies or even more than four teams with four separate drones. You'll see them zooming down the coast, stopping in one spot, and then zooming again. It connects with the city's broader embrace of drones for law enforcement at fire scenes. This is just another application in a city that's really been in love with drones.

Janae Pierre: We're in love with them for sure. They're in Times Square, they're at the beach, like we're talking about. They're everywhere. Community policing has looked different because of these drones, but Liam, I want you to walk me through something. When a shark is spotted, how close does it have to be for the Parks Department to shut down a beach? Also, once they do close down the beach, how long do they actually keep people out of the water?

Liam Quigley: A drone spotted a shark is close to 100 feet from swimmers in the past couple of weeks, around the July 4th holiday. That was enough for officials to say, "Okay, pull everybody out of the water, send a signal down to all of the lifeguards." You'll see them sometimes, they'll put their palms together and make a fin gesture to one another, and there go the whistles, out come the people, and that's going to shut down the beach for an hour for a mile in each direction.

A shark at Beach, 32nd Street could have a ripple effect down to Beach, 65th, Beach, 70th Street. There's one other thing, if I may mention about the drones. They do have these rescue tubes that can be deployed from some of the drones. Drones are not all about sharks. The city's learning how to deploy these things. We might see a different deployment next summer, depending on how things go.

Janae Pierre: For everybody listening, we're doing praying hands emojis. That means a shark is in the water. Liam, I'm wondering, as far as keeping people safe in the water, is the city's approach working?

Liam Quigley: I guess it's like, what evidence do we have? We have the absence of shark bites since 2023. That's true. It was the first in 70 years. I should even refine that a little more and say there was a Long Island bite this summer, but the shark experts that I talked to, sharks are not really out there to attack people. You've heard it a million times that shark bite injuries are exceedingly rare. You're more likely to get killed in a car crash on the way to the beach.

It's just so uncommon that a lot of people are saying, if you go looking for these animals, yes, they're there. Are you going to pull people out every single time? Right now, that's the plan, according to the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, who's overseeing the drone deployment at the beach.

Eureg Pinobi: That was WNYC's Liam Quigley. [music] Liam helped explain why drones were spotting more sharks over the summer and why it led to beach shutdowns, but what do we know about sharks themselves? After the break, Janae talks with marine biologist Hans Walters of the New York Aquarium about the sharks that live here in New York City and what beachgoers often misunderstand about them. We'll be right back.

Announcer: NYC NOW.

Janae Pierre: First, we heard about how city drones are spotting more sharks off Rockaway and other beaches this summer and how those sightings are leading to more beach shutdowns, but what do we really know about these sharks? To help us separate fact from fiction, we're joined by Hans Walters. He's a curator at New York Aquarium and a marine biologist who's been studying sharks for decades. Hans, thanks so much for joining us. Let's start here by talking about the biggest misconceptions that people have about sharks in our waters, because you've been doing this a long time. What do you wish beachgoers understood?

Hans Walters: I'd like them to understand that the sharks have been here for millions of years. What we are seeing is nothing new from. My viewpoint, as somebody who's been on the water for the last 20 years, studying these animals, the reason everybody says they're seeing more is that we have better technology to do so.

Janae Pierre: We're hearing that many of the sharks spotted off our beaches this summer are younger sharks. Can you give us some perspective on the kinds of sharks that are actually swimming in New York City's waters right now?

Hans Walters: I can. As a matter of fact, that's a lot of what our field program studies, the New York Bight, which is the actual name for the body of water outside of where we all live. The New York Bight, that's B-I-G-H-T. It means a body of water bordered on two sides by land. That land extends from Montauk, Long Island, down to Cape May, New Jersey. That body of water is what is referred to as a nursery ground for a number of species of sharks.

A nursery ground is where young sharks go to find the appropriately sized food and to stay away from bigger sharks that might eat them. That's why people are seeing younger sharks. You asked about species. The most common shark in our waters, the proper term for it is the dusky smooth-hound, but we know it more colloquially as a smooth dogfish or a sand shark. It's a shark that doesn't get any bigger than about three or four feet. They're a gummy shark. You can stick your hand in their mouth.

They have flat, blunt teeth, just eating soft-bodied food, so they can't even break the skin. There are young sand tiger sharks swimming along our beach as well. Those are the young sharks people are seeing. People may also be seeing sharks that they think are young, but that's just how big the sharks get. The bigger sharks, the younger versions of them are also swimming along our beaches.

Janae Pierre: You know, Hans, I recently on social media saw this video. It was shot on a drone. The video shows this shark just looking at people. Close to the shore, but just hovering around. I'm wondering, why do sharks come so close to shore in the first place? Is it about food, is it warmer water, or something else?

Hans Walters: No, they're there. These are coastal sharks that prowl the beaches normally. All sharks have a home range, and some of it's seasonal. The sand tiger shark, for instance, comes up here in the warmer months, usually show up late May, early June, and by the end of September, as the water cools down, they're gone. They've moved down south. While they're up here, they swim within a pretty specified area. It's not a territory. It's called a home range because a territory is something you defend. Sharks don't defend it, they just swim around it.

Yes, they're up here because there's food up here. They are looking for small schooling fishes close to shore because that's what they're designed to eat, but for them to be just cruising the beaches, that's what they do.

Janae Pierre: I'm learning so much from you, Hans. This is a wonderful conversation. While I have you here, there's this myth about sharks that they're mindless killers. What can you tell me about sharks' intelligence?

Hans Walters: That is a real huge myth that not only our field work, but especially the work we do in the aquarium has really helped to dispel that. First off, all sharks have very specific food types. All of the sharks we're discussing that are swimming along our coast and sharing the ocean with us, they eat small schooling fish, meaning something that's maybe a foot long or so, something that they can put in their mouth and swallow whole. They don't recognize things our size, whether it be us or other animals as big as us, as food. The second thing is, we have five senses. Sharks have six.

They're not blind. They see well. Yes, they have a legendary sense of smell, but they have great hearing, touch, taste, and studies have shown that when compared to other fish, they tend to have bigger brains. We have sharks here at the New York Aquarium. All of our sharks are trained in certain behaviors that help us to better care for them. I think we're learning every day how willing these supposed lower animals are to work with their caregivers.

Janae Pierre: You mentioned that sharks have six senses and a really strong sense of smell. I want to settle this once and for all. Can sharks really smell a single drop of blood from miles away, or is that just some Hollywood hype?

Hans Walters: It's not Hollywood hype. It's a misrepresented statistic. You can't go with distance. I'm going to give you an example. If you're on a beach and the wind is blowing the right way, somebody barbecuing a good distance away, you might smell it, but let's just say you live right near a paper mill or a sewage plant. Your neighbor might be barbecuing next door, and you might not smell it because there are other smells in the air drowning it out.

What sharks have is a sense of smell that can detect a very small quantity of blood in a large volume of water. I'm going to make up the statistic, but it's like a drop of blood in millions of drops of water. It's a concentration thing as opposed to a distance thing. Sometimes that translates into distance if the current is the right way and there aren't competing smells. It is true. It's just the way that they quantify it is usually wrong when you read it.

Janae Pierre: Now, on the rare chance that someone does encounter a shark in the water, how should that person react? What's the right thing to do?

Hans Walters: I would suggest if you see one, you calmly back away from it and leave the water. They're not going to stick around, and they're not coming for you. People that have been injured never saw the shark. Usually, the ones that you see cruising around are just passing through.

Janae Pierre: People often talk about shark season, Hans, and I'm wondering, is summertime shark season in New York waters, or is that even such a thing?

Hans Walters: Summertime is people season in New York waters. The sharks that are here in the summer just happen to be here at the same time that we go to the beach. When the water gets too cold for us to go to the beach, those sharks migrate back down south, and a different group of sharks migrates into our waters from colder or deeper waters. We don't encounter them because we're not going in the water. It's too cold for us. Yes, this is the season for a certain group of sharks, and then the colder months, late fall, winter, early spring, is the season for a different group of sharks that we don't encounter.

Eureg Pinobi: That was Hans Walters, curator at the New York Aquarium and a longtime shark researcher, helping us get a better understanding of why sharks are coming here and their behaviors. Thanks for listening to NYC NOW from WNYC. I'm Eureg Pinobi. Janae will be back tomorrow with some more of our best reporting from 2025.

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