River Sharks In Massachusetts?

Sharks are an accepted hazard of Massachusetts coastal life. Living or vacationing at the beach is awesome, but you could get stuck in 10 miles of bumper-to-bumper tourist traffic, you could get flooded by a hurricane and you could get eaten by a shark.

There are degrees of probability attached to each event- a Cape Codder is more likely to sit on Route 25 for an hour than to get the Jonah/whale treatment from a local leviathan- but the risk is there, and you have to balance risks and benefits before making a decision to go to such a place. It's why people tend to not vacation in Chernobyl.

People who live away from Cape Cod can scoff at some of those coastal risks. You have almost no chance of an ocean wave breaking on your house if you live in Bridgewater, other than Ye-Have-Offended-A-Wrathful-God types of events. Beach erosion doesn't come up much in Mansfield town meetings. Cape traffic doesn't really touch Halifax... although I'd bet it does if you overanalyze a bit.

One thing you should pretty much be able to count on is that you should stand very little chance of being attacked by a shark in, say, Rockland... at least once you eliminate fantasy stuff like the Chevy Chase-style land sharks or a Sharknado moving inland.

Jones River, Kingston MA

Sharks, for the most part, require salt water to live. They are designed for salty living, they have difficulty balancing without salt and will die very quickly if they are removed from salt water.

Not everyone knows that- the first time that I beat on a hotel door with my fist involved someone from Nebraska who didnt know that coastal people don't use salt water in their pipes and therefore fish caught in Cape Cod Bay can't be kept alive by filling the bathtub with tap water- but it is taken for granted by a percentage of the general population that is steady in the upper 90s.

People who study sharks, both professionally and as a hobby, know that there are several types of river sharks (mostly in Australia and India), and that Bull Sharks can go up rivers with ease. Bull Sharks are perfectly comfortable in fresh water, and that's sort of where we're headed today.

Mattapoisett River, Mattapoisett MA

Massachusetts has had three fatal shark attacks (off Boston, Scituate and Mattapoisett) since the White Bread showed up in 1620. Native Americans no doubt had attacks as well, but those attacks went down in a manner that Google never recorded. None of the Massachusetts attacks went down in a river, and two of them were quite some distance from shore.

Other than a Great White Shark getting stuck in coastal lagoon a few years ago, inland sharks are almost unheard of in Massachusetts. It does happen, though.

What is believed to be a Basking Shark was spotted miles up the Taunton River in Dighton, a noticeably non-coastal town.  A rumor exists of a Bull Shark going after a fisherman's catch in the Connecticut River, up by Holyoke.  I also saw the Housatonic River mentioned in the same discussion. A shark, probably a Great White, was spotted in the mouth of the Merrimack River once. Mouth-of-river vs. up-the-river is a distinction that we'll get to in a moment.

Bluefish River, Duxbury MA

The sharking in Dighton was painted as a Basking Shark by Dr. Gregory Skomal, and his word is better than mine. Basking Sharks are harmless to humans, unless they fall on them. The Great White Shark at the river mouth is perfectly natural and absolutely dangerous. The Bull Shark in Holyoke is the scariest story of the three.

Each of the fatal shark attacks in Massachusetts history almost certainly involved Great White Sharks, but we also have Bull Sharks. Bull Sharks are no joke. Bull Sharks can get up to a dozen feet long, weigh up to 700 pounds and have a reputation as an ornery, aggressive shark- an ex wife with gills. They are highly territorial, and Wikipedia describes them as having "virtually no tolerance for provocation." I don't know how to explain the math, but they have the highest bite force of any shark. Bull Sharks are very bad things to be swimming near.

Bull Sharks have been spotted in the Mississippi River as far north as Illinois, and up the Ohio River as far as, well, Ohio. They have been spotted in Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, which is brackish. They have been in the same Potomac River that George Washington once threw a dollar over. Iran has a dozen fatal river shark attacks.

Massachusetts is the far northern range of the Bull Shark. They bear their young in fresh water, where other sharks can't enter. They prefer warm, shallow, murky water. Massachusetts has that, at least in the summer.

If your town has a river that holds 3-5 feet of water and connects to the ocean, you could easily have a Bull Shark. If you go in the water and a hungry ol' Bull Shark is in the water... Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...

South River, Scituate MA

This is a scary scenario, and perhaps now is the time to introduce Numbers into the discussion. No one has ever been bitten by a Bull Shark in a Massachusetts river in recorded history. My tireless (OK, 2 page) Google searching yielded one or two non-verified river sightings of a Bull Shark in Massachusetts.

A shark attack itself is rare in Massachusetts. If you exclude fishermen, you have 3 fatal attacks and a half dozen or so non-lethal interactions over 400 years. Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York have one shark fatality each, with NY's attack being old enough that it happened to a Dutch guy (who perished when "the Devil appeared in the form of a fish" as he swam across the East River), perhaps a victim of a Bull Shark.

Keep in mind that 20-50 people win the Megabucks lottery annually, and the exponential stuff year to year sort of dwarves shark attacks very quickly. You are thousands of times more likely to win the Lottery, get hit by lightning, bed a Spice Girl, hit a hole-in-one or have a fight with Mike Tyson. More people have been removed from Donald Trump's inner circle since May than have been killed by sharks in Massachusetts in 400 years.

As bad as the odds are on being attacked by  a shark in Massachusetts, the odds against a river shark attack are even worse. None have ever happened here, putting it in the same statistical company as Yeti who have hosted the Late Show, tidal waves in Nebraska, asteroid impacts during the State Of The Union address and frogs who prefer Asian prostitutes.

What I believe is Maraspin Creek, Barnstable MA

That said, there is nothing to stop a Bull Shark from swimming into a Massachusetts river and picking off a bather. It would be a perfectly natural thing.

The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 which inspired the movie Jaws were perhaps partially the work of a Bull Shark, who struck two of the victims in a tidal river well inland. Five Americans were killed by Bull Sharks since 2001.

As far as "deep up a river" goes, the Bull Shark is the sole threat. There are some other concerns, however.

I'm going to leave the "if a Basking Shark can get 20 miles up the Taunton River, could a Great White Shark do so as well?" questions to Dr. Skomal, who is more schooled in these matters than I am. I think that salt-water sharks can enter estuaries during very high tides where the esturay gets extra salinity, but I also started in writing as a sports-betting columnist. I'll leave the answer as between "No" and "a GWS would actually be more likely to chase fish up a river than a plankton-eating Basking Shark."

Cut River, Green Harbor

The Jones River in Kingston, along with Duxbury Bay and Plymouth Bay, are nursing grounds for young Sand Tiger Sharks. Sand Tiger Sharks can reach 10 feet long, and have a mouthful of teeth that you don't want closing on you. 

I'm pretty sure that, once they start getting mature-sized, they swim off to other feeding grounds. They are considered to be docile, and have never bitten a non-fisherman in Massachusetts waters. 

They are noted bait-stealers, and have bitten scored several bites on fishermen and bathers in other states.

Still, they love river mouths, and there was and perhaps still is a STS research facility on the Jones River which catches and releases sharks in the Jones River area.

If you dangle your legs off the boat and a STS bites your foot, it will probably be of little comfort to you that this sort of attack is beyond rare in Massachusetts waters. Please note that this is a far-flung scenario which has yet to occur in the Bay State.

Acushnet River, Fairhaven and New Bedford MA

Massachusetts has several rivers that touch the ocean, and even if a shark can't swim up the river, they love to hang out at the mouth of the river and pick off fish entering the ocean. This could be problematic for people swimming or kayaking in river mouths.

Again, no river deaths of humans have been attributed to sharks in Massachusetts, and I can't even find records of an attack going down in a Massachusetts river.

You stand almost no chance of encountering a shark in a Massachusetts river... but don't say that we didn't warn you if it does happen.