Da nuh, da nuh, da nuh, da …

Wait. Can the ominous music!

A great white shark, now swimming in the movie monster’s charnel-house hunting grounds off Cape Cod, is being described by scientists as the anti-Jaws.

The 16-foot (4.8-metre) female — who goes by the lilting name of Mary Lee — has caught the fancy and fealty of hundreds of thousands of internet followers along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, where she’s been tracked in real time since September.

“People are loving on her,” says Chris Fischer, founding director of OCEARCH, a shark research organization that first caught and tagged the 1570 kilogram creature last summer.

“She’s igniting the whole eastern seaboard, she’s become the rock star of white sharks,” Fischer says.

While great whites have traditionally drawn public attention through terror-filled stories of beach-going mayhem, Mary Lee’s celebrity has been bitelessly benign, he says.

“You do not hear the theme of Jaws in the background of the conversations about Mary Lee online. It’s a tone of curiosity, it’s a tone of enlightenment. It’s ‘Welcome to Jacksonville, Mary Lee.’”

Fischer, whose organization pioneered the perilous catch-and-release technique for great whites that nabbed Mary Lee Sept. 12, has helped to tag the carnivores in their feeding habitats around the globe.

But this damsel fish is unique for scientists, he says, in her exclusive preference for coastal waters. Most of her kind in other parts of the globe spend only part of the year near land before heading out on open-water odysseys.

“She seems to really enjoy cruising up and down the coast and sticking her nose in and out of estuaries and rivers and the beaches,” Fischer says.

She’s also virtually unique amongst tagged great whites in her fondness for “finning,” or swimming along the water’s surface with her dorsal fin sticking out.

Since this characteristic fin is the place sharks are tagged, Mary Lee’s journeys have been easily tracked via satellite.

“Some sharks only come up finning for brief moments or every few months, so we get far less location data from them,” Fischer says.

“She’s amazing in that she’s coming up finning a lot, we’re getting many locations on her every day,” he says.

Her coastal preferences and finning predilections have combined to make the fish a growing celebrity along the U.S. east coast, where her meandering journeys from Cape Cod to northern Florida and back have been followed via an online tracker by hundreds of thousands of people, Fischer says.

Mary Lee was located Thursday about 100 kilometres miles due south of Martha’s Vineyard, where the 1975 movie Jaws was filmed.

“There’s kind of this constant feedback of her location which becomes addictive,” Fischer says.

“If you look on the Facebook page, the OCEARCH page, people are screaming ‘update the tracker, update the tracker.’ We’ve never had the public connect with a shark like that before.”

This large and fascinated public following is helping to change the great white’s blockbuster image as a mindless, ever-moving, killing machine, Fischer says.

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“It’s shifting the perception of white sharks … from one of fear to one of enlightenment and curiosity and appreciation,” Fischer says.

As important, Mary Lee is helping marine biologists solve ‘the life history puzzle of Jaws,” says Fischer, who named the shark after his mother.

One of those researchers, Greg Skomal, is looking at her travels as a possible template for the lives of great whites all along the U.S. east coast — something that’s been a virtual blank until this fish was tagged.

“Mary Lee could be normal and not unusual in the sense of what white sharks do here in the Atlantic Ocean,” says Skomal, a scientist with Massachusetts’ marine fishery division.

“We’ve got no book on the shelf that I could pull down and walk through and say ‘oh gosh, Mary Lee is doing something very different,’” he says.

Despite their information scarcity about east coast great white wanderings, scientists were surprised that this fish would head back to Cape Cod in the winter, Skomal says.

“We had a really strong idea that white sharks spent (most of their time) off the southeastern United States in the winter time,” he said.

“But she’s not going to Florida and hanging out in Florida like a snowbird. That’s blowing my mind.”

Mary Lee’s unexpected northern hike, which began last week, could also change scientific views on great white physiology and their capacity to handle temperature changes, Skomal says.

Along with the scientific goodwill she’s fostering, Mary Lee will also help change the great white’s public reputation as a man-eater, Fischer says.

After all, he says, she’s visited major beaches along the Atlantic Coast with nary a human nibble.

“She’s living and moving around off the eastern seaboard of the United States and it’s densely populated,” he says.