Last Monday’s shark attack off Truro’s Ballston Beach – the first in 76 years on Cape Cod – set off a media furor and horrified beachgoers along the storied Massachusetts peninsula that attracts millions of vacationers every summer. 
 
 It may also force the hordes that crowd the Cape’s beaches to relearn a lesson lost for decades when seals had all but disappeared from the New England coasts – that swimming among shark’s prey is very dangerous. 
 
 Lifeguards were on high alert, hundreds of spurious dorsal fin sightings were reported and airborne spotters scanned the offshore swells for great white sharks, the prime suspect in the attack on Chris Myers, 50. 
 
 More than 300,000 grey seals, and their vulnerable pups, now live on the Cape – a population 30 times the nadir in the 1960s – and the return of the seals has attracted a return, inshore, of great white sharks. 
 
 “The reason the great white sharks are coming closer to shore in the Cape Cod area, specifically on the eastern shore, is because of the growing grey seal population,” said Greg Skomal, a Massachusetts marine biologist. 
 
 Mr. Myers and his 16-year-old son were swimming several hundred metres offshore, close to known seal colonies, when something bit his lower legs. 
 
 Meanwhile harried Massachusetts tourism officials were battling to prevent a single attack morphing into a nightmare marketing scenario of sinister fins slicing the waters off Cape Cod. 
 
 “Not to downplay the nasty experience the bitee has had but there are sharks in the ocean,” said Betsy Wall, executive director of the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. “There’s a lot of signs and notices about where it is safe to swim and where it is not. People should stay away from seals.” 
 
 Mr. Myers, 50, who is expected to make a full recovery from deep gashes that required more than 40 stitches to close, apparently got the message. 
 
 “Maybe people need to be a little more careful than I was,” he told Good Morning America, his lower legs still heavily bandaged. “Don’t be an easy meal.” 
 
 “It’s the summer news doldrums and nothing tops a shark attack for media excitement,” said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research who also maintains the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. “It’s a hot-button issue and not just because of the movie Jaws,” he said. 
 
 “When humans disregard the rules … such as going in the water with seals in the area,” there will be attacks, he said. 
 
 Great whites, while hardly the ferocious, man-eating terrors depicted in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror-thriller Jaws, are dangerous and have been sighted with greater frequency in recent years off Cape Cod as seal populations have re-established themselves. 
 
 Seals, along with sea birds, fish and dolphins are routinely eaten by the great white, which can exceed five metres in length and weigh more than two tonnes. 
 
 Seal-hunting sharks like to lurk just offshore to attack as the seals leave or return to the beach, especially where the bottom drops off suddenly, Mr. Burgess said. “It’s a bad idea to swim there.” 
 
 Shark attacks on humans are statistically rare; fatal attacks vanishingly so. In 2011, a typical year, just roughly 120 attacks were verified worldwide, of which only 17 were fatal. By comparison, an estimated 100 people die every year from jellyfish stings. The last, and unconfirmed, fatal shark attack in Canada was off Nova Scotia in August, 1891. 
 
 “But ultimately, the sharks are in their realm, … we are the intruders,” said Rob Mottice, a shark expert and marine biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, Tenn. “There will always be a handful of attacks,” he said. “Sharks attack because they mistake humans for something else. Whatever we do won’t change that.” ||||| It was doing was sharks do naturally, hunting for food, and it cleared the beach in Eastham. 
 
 
 
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 Beach visitors and lifeguards at Nauset Light Beach spotted the shark after it took a bite out of a seal Wednesday afternoon. 
 
 Lifeguards immediately reacted. 
 
 
 
 "One of the other lifeguards gave me the signal for a shark, at which point I scanned back and saw an explosion of water and blood," said Chris Randall , a senior lifeguard. "The blood was the seal getting snatched by the shark. 
 
 
 
 "We cleared the water as fast as possible, we gave the word to the other beaches. The shark was heading north toward Marconi Beach." 
 
 "The beach was then closed for a period of at least one hour and the purple flag was flown at that time meaning there's dangerous marine life in the area," said Ryan Petersen, a South District ranger for the National Park Service, which runs the beach." 
 
 Petersen said swimmers are advised to stay away from seals and note the time of day. "Don't swim at dawn and dusk, stay in large groups if possible, don't go out too deep. Sharks are more prevalent near sandbars." 
 
 The Massachusetts Division of Marine Life Fisheries announced last month 68 great white sharks were swimming off the coast of Massachusetts during the summer of 2014. 
 
 
 
 The shark spotted Wednesday in Eastham was not a great white, but it still caused some concern. 
 
 "All of a sudden the lifeguards were like (yelling) get out of the water get out of the water," said Shelby Carney, who was swimming at the beach. "We didn't see the fin of the shark, but we saw the seals booking it the opposite way. All the other seals were gone." 
 
 
 
 "It was pretty gruesome," said young Tommy Berry, who saw the seal after it was attacked by the shark. 
 
 
 
 Tommy was back at the beach but won't be swimming, saying the appearance of the shark makes him a little nervous. 
 
 
 
 His older brother Matt Berry said, "it was almost like Jaws,'" referring to the 1975 movie about a huge great white shark that devoured people. 
 
 
 
 He estimated this real-life shark was 10 or 20 yards offshore. 
 
 Meredith Moise said she visits this beach for a week every summer. "I's very rare for something like that to happen so I don't think we have anything to worry about," she said.
– After a kayaker's close call was followed by Massachusetts' first great white shark attack since 1936, authorities have some advice for Cape Cod swimmers: Stay away from seals. More than 300,000 grey seals now live in the area—30 times more than in the '60s—and their presence has attracted plenty of great whites, notes the Globe and Mail. The seal-hunting sharks lurk offshore as seals leave or return to beaches, making the area where the bottom drops off a very bad place to swim if you don't want to be mistaken for a seal by a hungry shark, experts say. Tourism officials hope the attack won't be too bad for business. "Not to downplay the nasty experience the bitee has had, but there are sharks in the ocean," the director of the state's tourism office says. "There’s a lot of signs and notices about where it is safe to swim and where it is not. People should stay away from seals." The bitee himself, a 50-year-old man from Denver, suffered serious leg injuries but was released from the hospital yesterday—and he isn't holding a grudge against the shark. "I’ll be biting into a nice steak tonight and probably not thinking too hard about it," he told the Boston Herald. "So I can’t get too mad at the shark either."