Great white sharks are swimming near New York beaches, tracker says

• Great white sharks are swimming near the coasts of New York and surrounding states, a tracker says.
• Ocearch is a shark tracker that has tagged 70 sharks and monitors their movements.
• The tagged sharks represent just a fraction of the thousands of sharks on the East Coast.

As summer hits and people head to the beach, great white sharks are swimming near the shoreline of New York and surrounding areas like New Jersey and Cape Cod, according to Ocearch, a shark tracker that shares an interactive map of the sharks' locations on its website.

"Right now the sharks are loading up on dog fish, seals, and blubber over the summer," Chris Fischer, the founder of the Ocearch research foundation, told The New York Post.

The 70 sharks that Ocearch has tagged represent a small fraction of the thousands of sharks that are on the East Coast right now, according to the report.

Some of the tagged sharks currently in the New York area are juveniles, like 300-pound Charlotte. Others are massive, like Mary Lee who weighs almost 3,500 pounds.

According to the International Wildlife Museum, the chances of getting bit by a shark are one in 3.75 million, as Insider previously reported.

Fischer told The Post that shark attacks are not common, but beachgoers should be careful nonetheless.

"The moment you're 3 feet in the ocean, you're in the wild, and you've taken a risk," he said. "It's the same thing as wandering off into the woods without protection or unprepared during bear season - you might get yourself killed."

Fischer said to avoid areas where groups of seals or birds gather when you're in the water. These may be a shark's feeding grounds.

Summer shark sightings have become typical over the last decade in Cape Cod as seal populations increase, National Geographic reported. But recently conversation efforts have made sightings more common in shallow waters up and down the coast, as Boston University's The Brink reported.

Great white sharks live all over the world because they can migrate large distances, as Insider reported. They also live off the coasts of California, South Africa, and New Zealand.