Large marine animals in the North Atlantic?

[fencingfish]

With this CNN article about the beached basking shark off of Long Island:

5,000-pound shark washes ashore on Long Island - CNN.com

my coworker is hiding under her desk and vowing never to swim in the ocean again. I did some research on basking sharks and saw that they can come pretty close to shore. I was wondering, what are some of the largest marine animals that divers can see around here? What are the largest animals you've seen around here while diving?

 

[MSilvia]

First, your co-worker has nothing to worry about unless she's plankton, which is what basking sharks eat. She has more to fear from cows... they have teeth.

The biggest animals seen up here that I'm familiar with are:

• basking sharks
• humpback whales
• right whales
• finback whales
• minke whales
• pilot whales
• harbor porpoises
• mola mola (ocean sunfish)
• blue sharks
• thresher sharks
• mako sharks
• porbeagle sharks

The basking shark and the harbor porpoise are the only ones of these I know to come close to shore.

There are occasionally other large animals that make an appearance, and over the past ten years or so, there have been great white sharks, mobulus rays, and even a lost minke whale in the area. Large predatory sharks, for what it's worth, tend to be more common south of Cape Cod, although there are plenty of blues on Stellwagen Bank.

I know of one diver (Spectrum on SB) who was visited by the aforementioned beluga whale during a dive, and a buddy of mine saw a blue shark in the Isle of Shoals, but the largest non-human animal I've seen in these parts, in hundreds of dives, was a harbor seal.

 

[fencingfish]

I think she thinks that with a mouth that big, it doesn't matter if she's not plankton.

 

[crlavoie]

Funny... I've seen Basking Sharks and Mola Mola up close from a boat on several occassions and fairly close to shore (between Grave's and B Buoy). Every now and then, you hear of Basking Sharks at Nahant and or Revere Beach and yet I've NEVER heard of a diver seeing them.

 

[MSilvia]

I think she thinks that with a mouth that big, it doesn't matter if she's not plankton.

Just my humble opinion, but I think being swallowed whole by a filter feeder while wearing environmental protection and carrying my own air supply would definitely be one of the most downright interesting things to ever happen to me. I'd be a bit sad if I had to cut my way out, but damn... what a story that would make! I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over the extremely remote possibility that I'd run into something that had lived long enough to get to that size and that somehow didn't realize it couldn't eat something loud, bubbly, metallic, and many times larger than it's usual food.

When's the last time you tried to eat a salt shaker? Probably never, right? Presumably because you aren't used to thinking of them as food. Even though they're sometimes present when you eat other things, and even though it would fit in your mouth, you somehow never accidentally swallowed one. That's not so different from a basking shark managing not to swallow fish, buoys, or divers.

 

[tuner fish]

Tell your co-worker they are probably a billion times more likely to be injured crawling under the desk than ever seeing a harmles basking shark alive.

 

[MSilvia]

Tell your co-worker they are probably a billion times more likely to be injured crawling under the desk than ever seeing a harmles basking shark alive.

Totally. I'm more worried about being raped by zebras than I am about being eaten by a basking shark.

(Just to be clear, I'm not at all worried about the zebra thing...)