Mystery surrounds dozens of dead sharks found at New Jersey beach

SEA ISLE CITY, N.J. -- A mystery is unfolding at a New Jersey beach after nearly 30 small dogfish sharks were found dead along a stretch of beach inSea Isle City.

Michelle Greenling said she spotted the sharks during a walk Wednesday morning. The dead sharks were scattered across roughly 10 blocks of beach.

"All of a sudden, you start seeing a concentration of small sand sharks, and I thought, 'Well, this is odd,'" she recalled.

Stephen Nagiewicz, a marine scientist with Stockton University, says the sharks swim in schools of hundreds if not thousands. So they're pretty common in New Jersey.

But the cause of the deaths remains unknown.

"A couple of things it could be. There's something in the water, and they got sick and died. That's probably unlikely since people haven't been affected," said Nagiewicz.

Nagiewicz said a more likely explanation is that the sharks were accidentally caught and later discarded.

"They dumped them over the side or lost a net with all the things in there by accident, and all those sharks just floated up on the beach with the tides," he said.

The New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife said it is also common during the summer for dogfish and other small sharks to forage close to shore and become trapped near sandbars as the tide recedes.

A reporter with WPVI-TV asked the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection whether similar shark strandings have been reported elsewhere along the coast, but a response had not yet been received.

The investigation into what caused the sharks to wash ashore continues.