Half-ton great white shark spotted off Jersey Shore

A massive great white shark, en route to Canadian waters, was recently pinged swimming off the New Jersey coast.

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The 12-foot, 4-inch migratory shark, dubbed Ironbound, weighs in at about 1,000 pounds, and is named after the West Ironbound Island near Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where it was first spotted, CNN reported.

According to Live Science, the giant fish surfaced off the Jersey Shore at around 10:30 p.m. April 28, after being caught and tagged in October 2019.

“Mating season is over, we think, and Ironbound is on his way north to get into some good feeding ground and bulk up again for the next year,” Bob Hueter, chief scientist at OCEARCH, told CNN.

The nonprofit tags and tracks great white sharks in a bid to “better understand their elusive migrations,” Live Science reported, noting that a SPOT tag is attached to the dorsal fin and relays the shark’s location to a global positioning device satellite.

Hueter estimated that Ironbound is about 20 years old and confirmed to CNN that larger sharks tagged to date by OCEARCH measured as long as 17.5 feet and as heavy as 4,000 pounds.

“(Ironbound has) gone back and forth from where we found him in Nova Scotia and the Florida Keys several times,” Hueter told the network, estimating the shark has traveled about 13,000 miles since he was tagged.

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