Sharks seen gathering off the NC coast, video shows. How to avoid a bite
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As vacationers flock to the coast this Labor Day weekend, the fear of sharks could keep some beachgoers out of the water.
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Drone video shared with WECT in August shows dozens of sharks in the waters off North Carolina. But experts said the Wilmington-area footage showcases a healthy ecosystem and don’t believe it signals danger to the public.
Joel Fodrie, professor and director of the Duke University Marine Lab, said it may be only the second time he’s seen that many sharks in a video during his roughly 17 years of working with the animals in the state. The sharks could be blacktips, a species that sometimes moves around in groups.
“When it happens here — which is probably, you know, every few years it happens — we don’t always get a video of it,” Fodrie told The News & Observer in a Monday, Aug. 31 phone interview.
Though sharks rarely bite people, attacks can have serious consequences. So as we enter another weekend of beach-friendly weather, we turned to experts to learn about the presence of sharks and how to avoid bites in North Carolina.
Sharks can be found in the Atlantic Ocean, given North Carolina’s waters are on a migration path for species traveling along the East Coast. And many sharks on the move also live in the state’s brackish waters, the N.C. Sea Grant wrote on its website.
Hap Fatzinger, director of the N.C. Aquariums Division, told WECT that migrations could explain why the video Adam Pflum shared with the TV station showed a group of sharks gathered off Masonboro Island. The N&O has reached out for the footage and is awaiting a response.
Though sharks are found off our state’s waters, attacks are rare. That means driving to the coast or getting caught in a rip current may present greater risks, according to experts.
“I think if people focused on the odds and not the stakes, they certainly wouldn’t rank sharks in their top 20 worries of going to the beach,” Fodrie told The N&O.
Sharks found in North Carolina waters include the great white, bull, sand tiger, scalloped hammerhead, blacktip and Atlantic sharpnose.
This year, scientists have caught 100 sharks off the North Carolina coast. More than three-fourths of those sharks were Atlantic sharpnose, a relatively small species that can grow to nearly 3 feet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and data shared with The News & Observer on Tuesday, Sept. 1.
The figures come from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences, which works with the Duke lab to document sharks during warmer months. The creatures often are caught close to shore on hooks south and west of Cape Lookout.
“So far, 2026 data appear pretty consistent with what we’ve been seeing in the survey over the last 2+ decades: smaller, 3-4 ft sharks make up majority of our catch,” Holly Doerr, research specialist at the UNC institute, told The N&O in a Wednesday, Sept. 2 email.
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“Catch totals peak in the summer months when the water is warm, and more sharks/species are closer to shore (though we do experience non-summer seasonality of some species).”
The N&O hasn’t reported on any shark attacks in North Carolina this year. The International Shark Attack File confirmed one unprovoked attack in the state for all of 2025, according to data shared with The N&O.
And of the 31 bites reported in the state between 2012 and 2021, none were deadly, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
“They’re pretty rare,” Larry Cahoon, then a marine biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, previously told The Observer. “We had a spate of them in 2015 when there were about eight of them in the span of three weeks, but that was very unusual.”
Though it’s uncommon for sharks to attack people, Fodrie said shark “encounters probably aren’t that rare.” The animals likely are near swimmers, but they tend to be wary.
“At some point, you’ve probably come within a football field or two of a shark, because this is where sharks live — in the coastal zone, along beaches, near inlets,” Fodrie told The N&O.
The underwater vision of sharks is similar to ours, but they can hear people swimming and wading. That means bites can be cases of “mistaken identity,” The Observer previously reported.
“Often they’ll take a bite and realize, ‘Oh, that’s not what I thought it was,’ then take off,” Cahoon previously told The Observer.
So, how can you reduce the chance of being bitten by a shark? Here are some safety tips experts have shared:
“I think the only silver bullet is to not go in the water,” Fodrie said. “And as a people, we just accept the fact that going in the water is too fulfilling to our souls to totally abandon those activities.”
Portions of this story were previously published in The Charlotte Observer.
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This story was originally published September 3, 2026 at 1:29 PM with the headline “Sharks seen gathering off the NC coast, video shows. How to avoid a bite.”
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