NYC NOW - Best of 2025: NYC’s Shark Summer

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Drones started spotting sharks off New York City beaches this summer, leading to multiple closures. We take a look back at Janae’s conversations with WNYC’s Liam Quigley and marine biologist Hans Walters about what the sightings really mean.

Drone 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 Eurek Panobi, in for Jenae 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, Jena 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? 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.

We 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. So that's a good thing. And frankly, it'd be weird if there were no sharks in the ocean because that's where they live. But we are.

We are really, we have people sitting there looking for these animals and they're finding them. So tell us about these drones. So when did it all start? They really took off with this program in a bigger way after the shark bite incident in 2023. So on a given day at the Rockways, you might have four teams from three separate agencies or even more, more than four teams with four separate drones. You'll see them kind of zooming down the coast, stopping in one spot, and then zooming again. And it kind of connects with the city's broader embrace of drones for law enforcement at fire scenes. So this is just

another application in a city that's really been in love with drones. Yeah, 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? And also, you know, once they do close down the beach, how long do they actually keep people out of the water? A drone spotted, a shark is close to 100 feet from swimmers in the past couple of weeks around the July 4th holiday. And that was enough for officials to say,

okay, pull everybody out of the water, send a signal down to all the lifeguards. You'll see them sometimes. They'll put their palms together and make kind of like 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, an hour for a mile in each direction.

Oh, Shark at Beach 32nd Street could have a ripple effect down to, you know, beach 60th, beach 70th Street. But 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. So the drones are not all about sharks. There are cities learning how to deploy these things. We might see a different deployment next summer, depending on how things go.

All right. So for everybody listening, we're doing praying hands emojis, right? That means a shark is in the water. But Liam, I'm wondering, as far as keeping people's safe in the water. Is the city's approach working? 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 talk to, sharks are not really out there to attack people. I mean, 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 kind of saying if you go looking for these animals, yeah, 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 kind of overseeing the drone deployment at the beach. That was WNYC's Liam quickly. Okay, so 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, Jeney 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. So 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. So what do you wish beachgoers understood? Well, 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's been on the water for the last 20 years, you know, studying these animals, the reason everybody says they're seeing more is that we have better technology to do so. Yeah. You know, 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? I can. As a matter of fact, that's a lot of what our field program studies. The New York bite, which is the actual name for the body of water

outside of where we all live. The New York bite, that's B-I-G-H-T. It means a body of water bordered on two sides by land. And 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. And 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. And so 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. And 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 Sam Tiger sharks swimming along our beach as well. So 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. But they are the bigger sharks, the younger versions of them, are also swimming along our beaches.

You know, Hans, I recently on social media saw this video. It was shot on the drone. and the video shows this shark just kind of looking at people, like kind of close to the shore, but like just hovering around. I'm wondering why do sharks come so close to shore in the first place? Like is it about food? Is it warmer water or something else? 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. They 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. But 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 kind of cruising the beaches, that's what they do. I'm learning so much from you, Hans. This is a wonderful conversation.

So while I have you here, there's this myth about sharks that they're mindless killers. What can you tell me about sharks' intelligence? 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. So 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.

So 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 with my, 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. And I think we're learning every day how willing these supposed lower animals are to work with their caregivers. You mentioned that sharks have six senses and a really strong. sense of smell. So 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 like some Hollywood hype? It's not Hollywood

hype. It's a misrepresented statistic. You can't go with distance. And 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. So 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. So it is true. It's just the way that they quantify it is usually wrong when you read it. Now, on the rare chance that someone does encounter a shark in the water, how should that person react? Like, what's the right thing to do? Well, I would suggest if you see one, you sort of calmly back away from it and leave the water. They're not going to stick around and they're not coming for you. You know, people that have been injured never saw the shark. Usually the ones that you see cruising around are just passing through. People often talk about shark season, Hans.

And I'm wondering, is summertime shark season in New York City? in New York waters, or is that even such a thing? Summertime is people's season in New York waters. The sharks that are here in the summer are just happen to be here at the same time that we go to the beach. And 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. But we don't encounter them. because we're not going in the water. It's too cold for us. So, 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.

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 Urek Panobi. Janae will be back tomorrow with some more of our best reporting from 2025.