Monster sharks are thriving along N.J.’s shore. Is it a nightmare or a new golden age?

Bull sharks?

“We’re starting to see a couple,” he says, “and I think that’s just going to increase.”

Sand tigers?

“Getting huge,” he tells me. “They’re like 500 pounds.”

Sharks have survived five (count them, five!) mass extinctions. They are older than dinosaurs. They lived before both flowers and trees.

Sharks are so old — about 450 million years give or take — that they were swimming around when New Jersey was still connected to North Africa.

The cartilage-bodied fish have been fine-tuning themselves since the Paleozoic Era to survive in a violent, unforgiving, eat-or-be-eaten world that lies just beyond your toddler’s sandcastle.

“They’re here,” Wark says, “and they’re here to stay.”

They’re custom built for speed (that’s why torpedoes look like sharks). They’re darker on their top and lighter on their bottom (nature’s camouflage), so it’s difficult to spot them from above or below.

They even have a sixth sense (electromagnetism), so they can detect anything moving in the water.

“They’re really good at what they do,” says Jeff Kneebone, a Pequannock native and scientist at the New England Aquarium. “You know, if they were bad at something, they would have gone extinct.”

What we’re seeing today should be celebrated as “the great return to abundance,” a marine life renaissance fueled by protections put in place near the end of the last century, says Chris Fischer, founder and expedition leader for OCEARCH, the research group best known for tagging the famed great white shark Mary Lee.

The commercial industry had fished the hell out of the coastline using gillnets and other techniques in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, depleting sharks’ food supply.

“I mean, we had wiped it out,” says Fischer, who has tagged about 100 great white sharks — including 20 off the New Jersey/New York coast — and helped locate the great white nursery off Long Island.

New Jersey’s ocean was “nasty back in the ‘80s,” she says.

However, clean water efforts and federal shark protections are finally paying off.

“Now when you’re in New Jersey and you step into three feet of water, you are deep into the wild,” Fischer says. “You need to know that anything that’s in the wild can be there.”

But what’s happening out here is more complex than meets the eye, cautions Brooke Flammang, a biologist at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Large predators follow medium predators that follow small predators that follow tiny clams and microscopic worms, she says. And rising water temperatures could be forcing certain species to relocate here with potentially negative consequences. She’s seen no scientific evidence that the overall shark population is growing in the Atlantic.

“So it doesn’t mean that there’s more sharks,” Flammang says. “It just means that the ocean has changed.”

Yes, certain species of sharks are more prevalent here, Kneebone says. But others that once swam off our coast are declining in population or have shifted further north.

“The one thing that bothers me about how sharks are discussed in the media is how it’s one-size-fits-all,” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, sharks are all doing so much better now …’ There’s always the nuance.”

Still, larger shark species are as prevalent in New Jersey as Wark has seen in his lifetime.

Nearly every shark expert and marine biologist I speak with worries this story might do more harm than good. Their friendly tones drop an octave at the mere mention of shark attacks. Their eyebrows furrow at talk of beach-based shark fishing.

Keith Dunton tilts his iPhone toward me and shows a photo in disgust. The Monmouth University researcher doesn’t want more sharks to end up dead on the beach like this belly-up sand tiger in Holgate, he tells me.

“It’s very obvious someone caught it, didn’t know what to do with it, cut the line … ” Dunton says, his voice trailing off.

He says nothing for six seconds.

Could someone catch a shark like that by accident, I ask, filling the silence as vacationers lounge on the sand behind us in picturesque Cape May.

“No,” he says firmly, his words now tinged with annoyance. “They know what they are doing.”

Sharks typically kill fewer than five or 10 people a year worldwide. In 2024, there were 47 unprovoked attacks — 28 in the U.S. — and four fatalities. But humans kill about a hundred million sharks, intentionally or unintentionally, experts estimate. Many are slaughtered senselessly and lawlessly, like the bloodied sand tigers that wash up every summer on New Jersey beaches.

Thrill-seekers, most often young men inspired by social media, come out with $100 rods and medium-size reels in pursuit of an Instagrammable conquest, Dunton says.

The sharks often get violently dragged by their tales. They can’t breathe outside the water, and their gills fill up with sand. And that’s before a grown man decides to pose like he’s riding on its back.

Maybe it’s our deep-seated jealousy of a beast with an aerodynamic body and razor-sharp teeth. Maybe it’s simply our thirst to conquer our fears. Or maybe it’s our nature to kill what we fear.

“Sharks have a false reputation for being villains or these evil creatures that live in the ocean,” says Kiernan Bates, a research technician at Monmouth University who works in fish biology with Dunton. “I don’t think people realize that sharks don’t really think like we do.” 

I nod along. I pledge responsibility. I know I’m more likely to die from a mosquito bite than a shark bite. If sharks really wanted to eat us, we would be losing legs all summer every summer in a grisly bloodbath from Sandy Hook to Cape May.

Researchers describe the rare shark attacks that happen the way we describe teenagers busted for smoking weed. Confused. Misguided. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Just experimenting.

Maggie was only the ninth unprovoked shark attack in New Jersey waters since 1960. There hasn’t been a fatal attack here in nearly a century (and even that incident is disputed).

“They’ve been here when you were swimming out there, and they didn’t bother you then,” says Thomas Grothues, director of Rutgers University’s Marine Field Station in Great Bay. “So why would they bother you now?”

Everyone is here to see her.

On the other side of the glass, Kevin Becker rattles off shark facts — “Every scale is like a fingertip…” — in front of the largest collection of captive sharks in the Northeast at Adventure Aquarium.

Becker grew up in the Midwest, more than a 10-hour drive from the nearest ocean. Yet here he is in Camden, knowing so much about sharks that he can talk to me for five minutes without interruption.

“A lot of us watched (“Jaws”) and said, ‘I want to be that guy. I want to be the one out there learning about sharks,’” says Becker, 42, the aquarium’s assistant curator of fish and invertebrates.

The movie spawned a new generation of shark scientists fighting against the narrative of killing machines, supporting conservation and attempting to re-educate the public through popular programs like “Shark Week.”

And if there’s any place it can happen, it would be here, at the heart of the pro-shark movement, where 44 sharks representing 11 different species swim by as Becker pushes Big Shark slogans like “Revered not feared.”

Becker, a mild-mannered encyclopedia in a black zip-up fleece, is the anti-Quint, the “Jaws” fishing boat captain who said sharks have “lifeless eyes …like a doll’s eyes.”

Sharks here have names. And they have personalities.

There’s ST11, a small female sand tiger who loves mullet and has spots all over her scales.

There’s N6, a chunky male nurse shark down for any food and usually the first to greet human visitors.

There’s B18, a curious female sandbar who prefers salmon, has a small half circle notch on her right pectoral fin and is known for swimming closest to guests who pay up for shark encounters.

“You can say I love them,” senior biologist Alex Fleming says cheerfully after she feeds the sharks.

There’s no fighting between the large sand tigers and sandbars during feeding time. No bloodsport. No chaos. The sharks calmly take turns swimming past Fleming and gulping squid off the end of a long pole.

Some sharks see Fleming’s offer and don’t even bother eating. Yes, sharks turn down food.

“The media just really makes them to be much worse than they are,” she says.

But isn’t that why we’re all here?

Diamondback Terrapin Week couldn’t get greenlit if it was the last animal on the planet. And Spielberg couldn’t make a blockbuster about the humphead wrasse even if Tom Cruise jumped out of a plane and landed on one.

Sharks are the main event, the showstopper, the fish that makes big kids hold their mommy’s hands when they think nobody else is looking.

Elementary school students crowd into the Shark Tunnel — squealing (“Oh my god!”), pointing (“Look at that!”) and chasing each other (“I survived!”)  — as large sand tigers swim overhead. Teenage girls pose (and repose) for selfies. Parent chaperones crane their necks for a better view of the teeth.

The eating us, it turns out, is the point. The more we fear the shark, the more we love the shark. The more we love the shark, the more reason we have to save it. Hundreds of people flock here every year to pay $99.99 to squeeze into a wetsuit and get up close and personal.

“Sharks sell,” explains Greg Metzger, a New York marine science teacher turned great white researcher turned “Shark Week” guest. “Sharks are sexy.”

They dominate our culture even if much of the public has never actually seen one in the wild. Forget Jaws. We now have Baby Shark, Left Shark, Clark the Shark and 38 freaking years of “Shark Week.”

It’s why hundreds of people from across the globe travel to Matawan every summer for the town’s 1916 walking tour. It’s why there are news headlines every time a great white pings within 40 miles of the coast. It’s why the aquarium gift shop offers shark T-shirts, shark plushies, a shark snow globe, plastic toy sharks, a 100-piece shark puzzle, a shark blanket, a one-size-fits-all shark teeth mouthpiece and an “I chews u!” shark water bottle for kids.

“There’s a belief in American culture about your kind of individual invincibility and your power,” he says. “One of the ways to reinforce the idea that you have power is to think about the things that might undermine it and the ways in which you can prevent it, attack it or in some way control it.”

The aquarium is the physical intersection of shark love and shark fear. No attraction captures those mixed feelings like the Shark Bridge, a narrow, 81-foot, netted suspension walkway over the 550,000-gallon shark tank.

Ella Hwang, 6, keeps her eyes trained to the water as she crosses. Not many first graders have seen a shark in real life, she tells me. But the Wallingford Elementary student is watching fins glide beneath her as we speak.

She already understands our relationship with sharks as well as anyone.

“It’s a little scary,” she says in a sugar-sweet, high-pitched voice. “But it’s a little fun.”

She assures me sharks are harmless, unless you annoy them.

Bill Gordon wishes he’d listened to her.

Now, a man might be bleeding to death on the same sand.

And none of it was the shark’s fault. Gordon is literally the first to admit it.

“I foolishly went in the water too deep…” he says as he bleeds. “Totally my fault.”

Up until the bite, it had been a slow night. The big fish weren’t nibbling.

The first hit came on Gordon’s rod at 7:43 p.m., smack within the window he predicted. But the Media, Pennsylvania, resident isn’t able to set the hook in time, leaving him with a chewed piece of gizzard shad he tosses to the gulls.

Now it’s 8:10 p.m.

Dunton is “getting frustrated,” Bates tells me, half-amused.

Gordon ups the ante. He fished from this beach with his dad when he was a kid and then brought his kids here with their grandfather when they were young. He’s already tried a baby stingray — “shark candy” as he calls it — for bait.

“I’m pulling out all my stops,” he tells me, “and using my tuna belly.”

He uses a drone to drop his bait more than 100 yards offshore.

“What are you going to catch that’s bigger, tougher, stronger, toothier?” Gordon tells me, not knowing what’s about to happen. “Nothing as far as I’m concerned.”

Finally, at around 9:45, fisherman Chien Nguyen springs into action. Everyone hustles toward him, kicking up sand as they jog.

Sharks are motivated, as the fictional Matt Hooper once correctly lectured us, by only the most basic of needs. They swim. They eat. And they make little sharks. So they’re usually too preoccupied surviving to worry about us.

But if you hook one and try to pull it from its home?

Gaaaaame on.

Dunton’s crew gathers along the water’s edge, each member ready for their job.

“What’s the biggest thing that can go wrong?” I ask Bates, who’s holding a massive blue gurney to help get the shark in and out of the water.

“I think it’s really just being careful,” she says, “like making sure that everybody is out of the way of the mouth.”

The words soon prove prophetic.

Small waves crash under the moonlight. Dunton shines a flashlight into the water.

“There it is,” he announces.

Gray scales glisten in the glow of a flashlight. The dorsal fin juts out of the water only a few yards away.

Gordon takes a half-step toward the fin.

“Just wait,” Dunton says. “It’s a little deep.”

But Gordon crouches in an athletic stance, like a linebacker ready to make a game-winning tackle. He inches forward, the water now up to his knees.

I watch from just beyond the water line as Gordon steps forward and grabs the shark’s tail from behind, a high-risk maneuver this deep in the surf.

A crashing wave then slams Gordon just below the waist. The shark spins in the blink of an eye, its mouth lunging toward his leg.

“It got my leg!” he cries, his voice suddenly high-pitched and terrified. He tumbles backward with a splash.

Gordon hops out of the water and collapses onto the sand. Blood streams from his calf.

Bates dials 911. Mills tears open a trauma kit. Gordon can’t bring himself to look at the wound, but announces, “There’s a big rip in the calf.” Peter DiGeronimo, a veterinarian here to take shark blood samples, applies pressure to Gordon’s wound.

I look over my shoulder for any sign of first responders. Instead I see Nguyen, all alone, still holding his rod.

“See that right there?” he asks me.

The sand tiger shark is still on the line, resting at the edge of the water about 30 yards away.

Mills wraps the wound with gauze and a tourniquet. An ambulance screams in the distance.

“Go get your shark,” Gordon calls out, now remarkably calm.

Dunton’s team carefully pulls the female sand tiger into place. She stretches her neck as high as she can and shakes her open mouth in the air, a final act of defiance before lying still in the sand, her stoic eye staring straight at our videographer Andre Malok’s camera.

The researchers take the blood sample, cut into her stomach, insert the tracker, stitch the incision and guide the shark back into the water, all in about five minutes.

Gordon, meanwhile, asks the arriving EMTs not to cut his Anthrax T-shirt. He knows this scene could be “terrible publicity for the shark,” so he wants to be clear it did nothing wrong.

Before he can say anything else, a young EMT interrupts him with a more pressing question.

“Is this going to be on ‘Shark Week’?” he asks. 

Did a bull shark hunt and kill Lester Stillwell, Stanley Fisher and the others? Or was it a young great white with a penchant for lurking in brackish water? Could it have been multiple sharks?

And most importantly: Will the carnage happen again?

The intrigue draws hundreds of shark enthusiasts to Matawan every year searching for answers.

Nothing like the horrors of 1916 occurred at the Jersey Shore before that summer. And nothing like it has happened since.

But bull sharks and great whites are out there, in our waters, in swelling numbers.

Of course, you’re more likely to die in a car accident or be struck by lightning than to be bitten by a shark.

But it happens, even here in Jersey.

Kurtis Roinestad leads me along the buggy, overgrown banks of Matawan Creek this summer day and points to the spot where Lester was swimming.

“You didn’t see anything,” the chair of Matawan’s Historical Sites Commission tells me as we stare into the creek, “except for blood in the water.”

Roinestad then guides me through a winding cemetery. We stop at a stone marker no bigger than a pizza box with quarters and a toy car left at its base.

It’s carved: “Lester Stillwell” and below it, “1904-1916.” 

A small great white shark with human remains in its stomach was caught in Raritan Bay a few days after Lester’s death.

The shark had eaten part of somebody, but it probably wasn’t Lester, Roinestad tells me.

The remains were already decomposed, he says.

But what about Maggie?

The competitive ballroom dancer, a national champion in 2024, grew up going to the shore and collecting seashells with her cousins on the beach. Getting attacked by a shark in Stone Harbor was frightening, she says. What if a tendon snapped? Or a ligament tore? What if she couldn’t return to the dance floor?

But the emotional scars are worse. They came not from the shark. From us.

The news vans rolled up to her house in quick succession. Coverage of the shark bite “came off like it was so much bigger than it was,” she tells me. People made YouTube videos about her attack, exploiting her trauma for clickbait. And the comments section under news articles seemed to blame her — a then-15 year old — for sensational media coverage.

Maggie’s mother, Lisa, cut off interviews to spare her from the stress.

Even today, Maggie is reluctant to speak about the shark bite. She walks along the beach with me in a blue Stone Harbor sweater and white shorts because her mom convinced her that telling her story might inspire others.

Maggie got back into the ocean only a few weeks after the attack. She is determined not to let the bite ruin her relationship with the beach, where the sound of the waves puts her at ease.

We take a few steps into the ocean, the saltwater washing over Maggie’s sea blue toenails and her scars, which no longer hurt, she says.

She doesn’t fear sharks. And she doesn’t want others to be scared by her experience.

“You only live once,” she says. “You shouldn’t let your fears stop you.”

A little girl next to Maggie fills her sand bucket with water, her oversized sunglasses sliding off her face on a sunny July morning.

It’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.

There’s not a single shark in sight.