Video: A Great White Kicks Off Seal Eating Season on Cape Cod in Front of a Boatload of Tourists
Part of me was tempted to quibble with the editing of this video. While we live in a TikTok world of ever shorter attention spans, that's no reason to cut this down to two seconds or whatever it was, and not show the seal this Great White turned into a quick afternoon powerbar. But I'll cut this amateur cinemaphotographer some slack. We're not all the Discovery Channel, with the time and resourced to send a union camera crew out into the open ocean for weeks at a time to deliver us the money shot we all crave:
Besides, the shark they did capture wasn't into playing with his food. Memorial Day is almost upon us. That means we're in for 3 1/2 months of millions of humans joining these seals in the waters of Cape Cod like the fries next to a finned, blubber-filled hamburger. And this shark couldn't have made his intentions any clearer. He's the apex predator in these parts. Those beaches are his dojo. He makes the rules. Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy.
Seriously, could any fish have a better flair for the dramatic? And could his timing have been any more impeccable? For all we know, he probably stalked dozens of seals just waiting for a Whale Watching boat to come along before he pounced. Just to remind us tasty morsels we're about to return to what amounts to the buffet at his personal Golden Corral. To put us on notice once again that it's a carcaradon carcharias. A Great White. That what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine. An eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all. And that starting in just a few days, we're going to be serving him up a smorgasbord. Meanwhile, all the mayors on the Cape are going to once again chase after the summer dollars and ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites them in the ass.
Welcome to the Cape everybody. Relax and enjoy your summer: