If you visited the Ocearch marine animal tracker within the final week, your eyes might need been drawn to the japanese seaboard of North America, the place a bombardment of blue dots made it appear to be the shoreline was being assaulted by white sharks.

Panicky tweets ensued together with sometimes hyperbolic tabloid headlines, however it seems the amalgam of elasmobranches is nothing to fret about. It’s simply shark migration season alongside the coast, although local weather change might be taking part in a long run position.

“These headlines come up just about every time somebody goes on the shark tracker and just has a display, all the tags,” Charles Bangley, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University, stated. “There probably always have been more sharks than you would have expected. It’s just that we have the technology now to actually see them.”

Eighty-three tagged white sharks are at present seeing out their migration from the cooling waters off Massachusetts and Canada to the hotter havens of North Carolina and Florida. Sharks head out at totally different instances, which means the animals are unfold alongside the coast. Bangley stated that local weather change is affecting these migrations, because the animals will head out of the northern waters later within the yr than regular, because the water temperatures keep balmier for longer.

“One of the reasons you see this big spread right now is that those sharks are still kind of transiting,” Bangley stated. “So you have some sharks that could have already made it all the way down to Florida, and then you have the sharks that are just now getting around to leaving Nova Scotia waters.”

G/O Media could get a fee

43% off

75″ TCL Mini LED TV

Normally $2,300, the TCL 6-Series boasts a 4K QLED screen with Dolby Vision and HDR10+ and access to thousands of apps on Google TV.

Warmer temperatures will also get the sharks to stay closer to shore, Bangley said, a phenomenon that can increase the number of shark sightings. (Shark attacks on humans remain an extremely rare occurrence, but the animals’ proximity means sightings are relatively common.)

All told, the number of sharks on the tracker is actually a testament to the success of white shark conservation efforts, according to Bangley. An animal once demonized (perhaps most famously by the film Jaws) is no longer being hounded by humankind. “These shark populations are recovering back to what had been their natural levels before they were overfished,” Bangley said. “It seems like way more sharks because a generation of fishermen have grown up with depleted shark populations, but it’s actually almost like the system is going back to normal.”

Of course, the world recovering shark populations are returning to is a very different one than has existed before. Climate change is changing the color of the oceans, melting Arctic ice, and reducing the oxygen in the water.

Sharks themselves have found some way to adapt, including spending more time further north as waters heat up. But rising temperatures are also putting pressure on some species, to say nothing of the impacts of industrial fishing. Overall, an estimated 70% of sharks have been wiped out over the past 50 years alone. So even if the current shark migration is normal, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if the sharks do decide to amass and rise up one day soon.

More: Two Bull Sharks Swam Up the Mississippi River All the Way to St. Louis