Hammerschlag fell in love with sharks in the early 2000s, an era when shark populations were plummeting worldwide. By then, many species in Atlantic Canadian waters had declined by more than 70 per cent since the 1960s. The most-cited reasons for the drop, says University of Guelph shark researcher and biologist Steve Crawford, include recreational anglers catching and killing sharks for “jaws and records” (a practice that was ended in Nova Scotia just last year), entanglements with commercial fishing gear, and poisoning from toxin loads from consuming prey species lower down the food chain. Today, an estimated 80 million sharks are killed by humans every year; in 2023, 18 human deaths were attributed to shark encounters globally, which was an unusual spike. 

While earning a master’s degree in predator-prey interactions, Hammerschlag partnered with a South African ecotourism operation that offered shark diving tours, which inspired the idea to start a similar business in Nova Scotia. “I knew I was going to cause a whole lot of commotion,” says Hammerschlag, who researched sharks and taught at the University of Miami for 13 years before moving back to Canada. He sees his current business as a win-win: tourists get a chance to see a white shark, while he uses each trip to identify individual animals and record their movements and behaviours. He also carries a shark-tagging stick on board, although he didn’t use it during Atlantic Shark Expeditions’ first season on the water. His accumulated data, he says, will form the basis for future research papers he plans on writing. 

Similarly, the tour company’s skipper, Gaetan, has been obsessed with sharks for as long as he can remember. He saw his first, a dogfish shark, in Cape Breton, N.S., in 1963, during an era when the prevailing view was that the only good shark was a dead shark. His father, a fisherman, had brought five-year-old Gaetan along to check the family’s mackerel nets when he discovered they had been sunk by an influx of dogfish sharks. Grabbing one by the tail, his father slammed it off the boat’s side and tossed it onto the back deck. “I was sitting there with the shark, and I was fascinated,” recalled Gaetan. Suddenly the shark — a female — started to give birth. “All these little baby dogfish were coming out of the shark with their yolk sacs still attached,” says Gaetan. From that moment, he was hooked. 

Dubbed “great” for their size and power, white sharks can grow up to six metres — as long as giraffes are tall — and sport a girth of more than two-and-a-half metres. Females typically grow larger than males and hit sexual maturity late, at around 33 years old. While in utero, white shark pups are ovoviviparous, meaning they begin their lives gorging on their siblings (or half-siblings) while still in their mothers’ embryonic chamber: different pups from a single litter, typically numbering from two to 14, can have different fathers. When born, young white sharks are already more than a metre long and are abandoned by their mothers almost immediately. They feed exclusively on fish at first, their membrane-coated embryonic teeth growing longer and more pointed, then eventually broader and serrated as they age. Those teeth famously run through their mouths on a kind of cycling conveyor belt, with new replacements lurking in orderly rows, ready to emerge as old ones break or fall out and drift to the ocean floor. 

In what is now Nova Scotia, Indigenous Mi’kmaq have fished and hunted for swordfish and seals alongside the predators for millennia: shark teeth have been found in shell middens, evidence of the respect the creature’s power and presence garnered. “Our ancestors and the shark’s ancestor originally mingled together,” says Melissa Labrador, lead for Pemsik Mawa’tasikl Anko’tmu’kl and senior L’nu advisor on conservation and climate change for the conservation group Oceans North. “We’ve always had a relationship with sharks, but we’ve also understood healthy boundaries.” Back when her earliest relations travelled the ocean in birchbark canoes — which do, she laughs, resemble a “giant seal” — they took measures to avoid the chance of a negative shark encounter, including fastening spruce roots and seaweed to the vessels to mimic shallow waters. They knew full well, she says, the extent to which they shared their communal oceanic hunting grounds. 

For more than a year, alarmed by the number of sharks he’s seen swimming near popular beaches, Gaetan says he has asked Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the province of Nova Scotia to install signs warning of the risks of shark attacks. “Some of the areas that we’re in now — it’s very hot with populations of white sharks, and there are beaches that are literally not even a half-mile away,” he says. Like other shark enthusiasts, he doesn’t like the term “shark attack,” likening white sharks more to curious dogs than vicious predators. “When a dog sees something he doesn’t understand, he’ll go over and nibble on it. Sharks are the same,” says Gaetan. “Unfortunately, when they nibble, they’re punching holes in you.” 

Weeks after the attack on Pepper, news of the dog’s death reverberated across the province. The event was unprecedented on Nova Scotia’s south shore. In the aftermath, Crawford spoke with the dog’s owner and learned of another hunter who had seen four white shark breaches over six hours in a similar area the next day. Breaching is exceptionally rare in the northwest Atlantic, he says, and increases the probability of a previously unknown white shark mating zone in the area. Given “the serious human risks posed by the recent intense white shark activity” and “the persistent reluctance of federal, provincial and municipal agencies in Atlantic Canada to take action about shark public education and risk management,” Crawford went so far as to issue his own advisory on a shark email list he operates and encouraged locals to print and post signs along wharves and popular beaches. “Like our American cousins along the New England coast, Atlantic Canadians need to have trauma kits with tourniquets at each and every single swimming beach,” he says. “The vast majority of Canadians will never see the air bag in their cars, but they are damn glad to see that air bag when it matters the most.”

Overall, as a society, “we’ve given ourselves this illusion that the beach is safe,” says Ret Talbot, the co-author of Chasing Shadows, about American biologist Greg Skomal’s decades-long career studying great whites. During his reporting, Talbot asked an official with the United States’ National Park Service if they planned to install any real-time receivers along the tourist-frequented beaches on Massachusetts’ Outer Cape. “She basically explained to me that it really came down to the question of liability,” he says. “None of these systems have a 100 per cent success rate.” In an email, a spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada didn’t answer a question about signage but did say white sharks “can be anywhere along the coasts in Atlantic Canada, especially in the summer months” and that water users should always keep an eye out for shark activity.