One of the largest great white sharks ever seen prowling in the Atlantic has resurfaced after disappearing for months along the US East Coast.
Nicknamed Contender, the male great white shark measures a whopping 13 feet and nine inches in length and weighs nearly 1,700 pounds.
OCEARCH, a non-profit group focused on shark research and ocean conservation, said that the massive predator reemerged from the ocean on July 10, when Contender’s tracking tag briefly reactivated somewhere near the East Coast.
Researchers originally encountered Contender on January 17, 2025 just 45 miles from the Florida-Georgia coast, and were able to attach a satellite tag to his dorsal fin, which sends location pings when he surfaces.
Since then, Contender has traveled thousands of miles, moving north along the coasts of North Carolina, New Jersey and Massachusetts‘s Cape Cod as he migrated in search of food.
Until this month, however, the monster ocean predator had not been seen since late April 2026, when OCEARCH determined he had been in the waters near North Carolina.
The group revealed that Contender is the largest male white shark they have ever tagged among the North Atlantic population.
While scientists now know he is still out there, the latest signal left out a key piece of information, as the satellite data was unable to determine Contender’s exact location right now.
OCEARCH tagged ‘Contender’ in January 2025, a white shark close to 14 feet in length and weighs over 1,600 pounds
OCEARCH tracking satellites spotted Contender on July 10 but could not pinpoint a location. His last known position was near North Carolina in April 2026
Last week’s sighting was called a ‘Z-ping,’ meaning Contender spent only a few moments at the surface before diving back into the Atlantic.
That signal burst did not give Argos, the orbiting satellite system tracking tagged sharks, enough time to lock on to Contender and determine an exact location near the US.
Argos satellites can only pick up the pings from sharks when their entire fin comes out of the water and the signal is transmitted to space. With a longer signal, the satellites are able to show shark fans where each tagged creature is in real time.
So, for the time being, scientists only know that Contender is still alive and active somewhere near US beaches and possibly near a surprising new hunting ground for great whites in the North Atlantic.
A 2023 study found that the waters near Massachusetts may be fully revitalized and filled with great white sharks after years of inactivity.
The research, published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, estimated that 800 individual great white sharks visited the waters off Cape Cod between 2015 and 2018 alone.
Exactly one year ago, Contender was spotted in this area near the Massachusetts coast, where one of their main sources of food gathers – seals.
After that, the great white was seen traveling into Canadian waters last September, where it approached the Gulf of St Lawrence in Quebec – over 1,200 miles from his last known position near North Carolina this spring.
Contender (Pictured) is a massive white shark that has been tracked all around the US East Coast over the last year, reaching Canada’s Quebec in the north and Florida in the south
Contender (Pictured) is much larger than the average male shark, which measures between 12 and 13 feet in length
Contender has also been spotted near Canada’s Cape Breton Island and in the waters near Florida this past winter, where the deadly predator got dangerously close to beaches in St Augustine, Daytona Beach and Port St Lucie.
As summer reaches its peak and millions head to the beach, scientists have noted that shark encounters will only increase as more people enter the water near crowded shark-hunting grounds.
Thanks to new laws over the last 30 years in the US, which have strengthened environmental and wildlife protections, the OCEARCH team has said that sharks have benefited tremendously.
The bounce-back in their populations has been credited to both stricter laws against humans hunting these creatures and better conditions that have restocked their food sources in the Atlantic.
Chris Fischer, the founder of OCEARCH, told the Daily Mail last summer: ‘We’ve now successfully returned our ocean to abundance. So yes, we’re going to be seeing things that people think are unusual, but that’s actually what the ocean is supposed to look like.’
While Contender is one of nearly 500 sharks the conservationists have tagged in the last two decades, Fischer said the giant hunter could be one of thousands that have returned to US waters.
‘There is no way that we have captured more than a fraction of one percent. I think that you’re looking at tens of thousands of them, certainly 10,000 of them most of the time,’ Fischer revealed.
Research by the Florida Museum has shown that the three likeliest states where beachgoers will suffer a shark bite are Florida, Hawaii and California.
However, multiple people have been bitten by sharks, including great whites, in the Carolinas, near Texas and around the waters of New York’s Long Island.
