As soon as National Geographic Explorer and photographer Brian Skerry locked eyes with the enormous animal, he knew immediately what was staring back at him. “There’s no mistaking that face,” he says.

A nearly 10-foot long great white shark was just four feet away.

Sharks tagged with tracking devices have been documented off the U.S. coast of Maine, but Skerry thinks this is the first underwater photo of one here. Skerry started diving in these waters around 50 years ago. Since then, he’s spent more than 10,000 hours underwater , photographing marine animals from above and below the water.

Once rare, great whites are now flourishing in the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Nova Scotia, Canada. While these growing numbers might make it easier to see or photograph a shark in nearby waters, experts say the risk of being bitten by a great white remains low.

Skerry’s encounter on July 8 was fleeting. “Maybe three minutes,” he says. “Then she was gone, and we never saw her again.” 

Luckily, his camera was ready. He snapped a photo of what he suspects is a juvenile, mouth slightly open and white belly glowing against the eerie green water. Her surface reflection hovered above her like a halo.

“White sharks have always been here,” says John Chisholm, a marine biologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston who says this is the first confirmed underwater photo of a great white shark he’s seen in Maine.

In the Gulf of Maine, great whites have been recorded in historic fisheries data and 1,000-year-old teeth have been found in archaeological digs, but trophy fishing and commercial bycatch in the 1970s and 1980s may have caused populations to decline by around 73 percent. 

In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act created legal protections for seals and thereby protected one of the key prey species great whites feed on.

Over two decades later, in 1997, the National Marine Fisheries service began more tightly regulating and in some cases prohibiting shark fishing, a protective regulation Massachusetts strengthened in 2005 after the state banned the possession and sale of lucrative shark fins. They are now protected throughout their Northwest Atlantic range–it's illegal to catch, keep, or possess a white shark in U.S. waters.

This helped great white populations rebound. Scientists recorded over 100 individual great whites in Maine waters between 2012 and 2023.

“We started seeing both seals and white sharks in more and more numbers than we had ever seen in recent memory on the Cape,” says Camrin Braun, assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s marine predators group. Braun is also unaware of any previous such image of a great white in Maine.

A fatal shark bite in 2020, the first in the state’s history, made the public aware that there were even white sharks off the coast, he adds.

Could warming sea surface temperatures be luring more sharks to Maine’s coastline?  

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 97 percent of the world’s oceans. “It’s one of the global epicenters for warming,” says Braun.

Warmer waters might allow juveniles to travel further north into waters that were once too cold for great whites, though Chisholm thinks an increase in shark numbers is more likely to result from conservation regulations.

More sightings might also be the result of more people on the water with a digital phone camera. Twenty years ago, it could take Chisholm days, weeks, or even years to confirm a sighting. Now he receives dozens a day through the Sharktivity app. 

And while a new photo of a great white has now surfaced, it’s no indication that New England beachgoers should now be more fearful of setting foot in the ocean.

There’s a higher risk of being hurt while driving to the beach than getting bitten by a great white shark in the water, Chisholm says.

We can coexist with sharks if we are mindful “in the way that somebody in Alaska walks in the woods knowing there might be a grizzly bear,” Skerry says. “We can learn to appreciate these animals, even if we don't want to swim out and give them a hug.”

To be shark smart, don’t swim alone, in murky water, or if you see seals or big schools of bait. Avoid swimming at dawn and dusk and don’t “make a commotion… That can attract a shark,” Chisholm says. 

As apex predators, sharks play a vital role in keeping the ocean healthy, but they face more danger from us than we do from them. Humans kill over 100 million sharks each year, says Skerry: “The only truly scary ocean would be one without sharks in it.”