Body of Mutilated Seal Washes Ashore After Shark Attack

A dead seal has been found on a beach in Massachusetts with huge bite marks taken out of it.

The marine mammal was discovered washed up on Wednesday on Humarock Beach, around 30 miles southeast of Boston.

"Dead seal found on Humarock Beach (Scituate) with visible shark bites," the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy's Sharktivity app said, posting a photo of the seal on Wednesday, as reported by the daily newspaper Boston Herald.

This finding came the day after a local on the island of Nantucket posted a video to Facebook of a shark attacking an unknown animal, with blood spurting into the water.

"Shark having a feast," Edita Ze captioned the video taken at Great Point, Nantucket, in a Facebook post.

Newsweek cannot independently verify if this video is indeed showing an attack on the same dead seal, however. Nantucket is around 80 miles south of Humarock Beach.

The species of the shark in the video is unknown, but numerous great white sharks have been spotted in the area this week, with a surge in sightings being reported near Cape Cod, 45 miles south of Humarock Beach.

Cape Cod is now a hotspot for the species, according to 2020 research in the journal Wildlife Research. The peninsula hosts one of the largest seasonal great-white-shark gatherings in the world outside of South Africa, California and Australia, with an estimated 800 individuals visiting Cape Cod between 2015 and 2018.

"What we're seeing at Cape Cod is a re-establishment of the trophic (food) web and what it may have been like before overfishing and the slaughter of many of the animals at the top of the food chain," Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, told Scientific American.

Great whites are one of the world's largest species of shark and are found in temperate waters around the globe. They can reach up to 20 feet long, and weigh up to 5,000 pounds.

Most great white sharks along the U.S. East Coast migrate with the seasons, traveling north during the summer, then south again during the colder months.

These sharks usually eat larger marine animals such as seals, but also consume fish, cetaceans like dolphins, sea otters, and seabirds.

On ocean research organization OCEARCH's tracking map, several great white sharks have pinged near to Cape Cod in recent months. A 9-foot-long female dubbed Anne Bonny, after the pirate, was traced just off the coast of Cape Cod Bay on July 5.

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