Celebrity Shark 'Pings' Off Eastern Shore

ACCOMACK, COUNTY, VA — So there's this great white shark named Mary Lee. She's something of a celebrity that was "tagged" five years ago by researchers with Ocearch.org, an organization that tracks the movements of great whites and tiger sharks. Well, her tagging device registered a ping last Friday off the mouth on the Chesapeake Bay.

Mary Lee happens to have more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. No, really. She also happens to be 16-feet long and weighs more than 3,400 pounds — or at least she did when she was tagged for tracking purposes off Cape Cod.

(For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts. Also, like us on Facebook, and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

According to Ocearch, Mary Lee has traveled more than 402,000 miles since being tagged Sept. 17, 2012. Before the ping last Friday, she most recently had pinged April 22 off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Researchers says she's headed north for the summer.

Click here to see where Mary Lee has been.

Here's more information about Ocearch:

"In a collaborative environment established by Founding Chairman and Expedition Leader Chris Fischer, OCEARCH shares real-time data through OCEARCH’s Global Shark Tracker, inspires current and future generations of explorers, scientists, and stewards of the ocean, and enables leading researchers and institutions to generate previously unattainable data. OCEARCH has completed 28 expeditions, worldwide, as of April 2017.

"Most recent expedition took place in the Lowcountry – Georgia & South Carolina. In 2016, OCEARCH open sourced the data on the Global Shark Tracker to 2.3 million users, achieved an annual global reach of more than 6 billion media impressions, a Facebook reach of 70 million impressions, and a Twitter reach of 134 million impressions."

Photo: Ocearch