To illustrate to a reporter what that might look like, he referenced “Jaws.”
“When Quint went to shoot the shark, he was out on the end of the pulpit of his boat,” Skomal explained in a phone call with The Daily News.
The similarities between the fictional Quint and Skomal end there. Far from a shark hunter, Skomal’s a biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and an internationally-recognized shark expert.
In 2009, he and John Chisholm were the first to successfully tag and track white sharks the name preferred by scientists over “great white sharks” in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean using high-tech tags, according to the Massachusetts-based Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.