A sand tiger shark was found with at least three stab wounds and left on a Marshfield beach over the weekend.
Local shark biologist John Chisholm of the New England Aquarium shared photos of a young sand tiger shark that he said was was stabbed and left on the beach.
Chisholm said the shark was still moving when a woman found it on the beach on Saturday, the Boston Globe reported.
It was reported to measure less than 3 feet and was likely around 1-year-old, the Globe reported.
“It’s pretty unlikely that it survived,” he told the Globe. “Those were pretty big wounds along the body.”
All captured sand tiger sharks are required to be released in Massachusetts.
The shark population began to rapidly decline due to “sustained fishing pressure,” according to the New England Aquarium. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the population along the East Coast declined by about 90%, making them a rare sighting.
“… this population decline was acknowledged relatively quickly by federal and state fishery managers and conservation measures were enacted in 1997 and 2009 that prohibited the retention of any sand tiger in any fishery along the U.S. East Coast — in other words, all captured sand tigers must be released,” the aquarium wrote.
Still, people often mistake tiger sharks as dogfish which is part of the reason people kill them, Chisholm wrote.
“It’s the responsibility of fishermen & women to know their catch,” Chisholm wrote in his X post.
