Dead shark washes up on Little Compton beach

LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. (WLNE) — The Atlantic Shark Institute said someone made a call to the Mystic Aquarium about a dead shark that washed up on the shore late Thursday afternoon.

It was determined to be a sand tiger shark, found on Tappens Beach in Little Compton.

“It is rare for them to end up on the beach,” Jon Dodd, executive director for the Atlantic Shark Institute, said. “But it is not rare for sand tigers to be all along our coast.”

“I was very surprised to hear there was a sand tiger shark here,” Linda Hathaway, a beachgoer from Bristol, said. “I do swim here and I have been coming here for many, many years. It’s a very special place.”

The reason the shark washed up on shore remains unknown.

“It’s too early to tell, and we don’t know,” Dodd added. “In this case, this shark looked like it’d been dead for a day or a couple of days, maybe, and when they die they decompose relatively quickly.”

The experts said sand tiger sharks are common in Rhode Island and have been critically endangered for a while now.

This specific shark was a young male and only a little over three feet long.

“It’s really sad. Sharks are a necessary part of a functioning ecosystem,” marine biology student Samantha Bluhm said. “If we don’t feed them, then they go places where they aren’t normally and then we interact with them and that becomes a human health problem.”

Many loyal Little Compton beachgoers said this was the first time they ever heard of a shark appearing on Tappens Beach.

“This is the first time we are hearing anything of that sort,” Hathaway said. “And it’s been many years we have been coming.”

Workers at NOAA will pull apart the shark and complete a necropsy to determine why the shark ended up on the beach.