The Boston Globe29%
Boston brothers catch tiger shark off Cape Cod 9%
By Bryan Hecht27%
7/25/2026, 4:47:28 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Self-Serving Bias, and Recency Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 9.7% saturation with 58 hits. Analysis detected 388 faulty-reasoning hits from 599 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.4% and a BS Rank of 9% (20,049 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 91.60% of the article peer group.
Boston brothers catch tiger shark off Cape Cod
Nate Rouette has fished all up and down New England, the East Coast, even abroad.
But this week, he didn’t have to go far to land the best catch of his life.
In an “absolutely surreal” experience, Rouette, 23, and his older brother Nelson reeled in a tiger shark off a beach near Falmouth in the early morning hours on Thursday.
“My brother and I grew up summering on Cape Cod … fishing stripers, albies, tuna, fluke, the whole game,” said Rouette, who lives in Brookline.
“I never thought in a million years I’d run into a tiger ... [and] to catch one off the beach, even though it’s a juvenile, was really crazy.”
Rouette works for On The Water magazine, a regional fishing publication, and tries to get to the water as much as possible, even during the week.
“It was a beautiful night,” Rouette said of his midweek fishing expedition, taken after knocking off work at the magazine, which is based in Falmouth.
“There wasn’t a soul on the beach.
And we probably spent three hours getting a couple of bites here and there, but more just happy to be out there and catching up.”
Right as they were getting ready to leave the beach around 12:30 a.m., one of the rods went off.
“It seemed like a small round shark, sandbar shark right when the dorsal fin broke the wash,” Rouette said.
“Once I got a little bit closer … I was just screaming like, Nelson, it’s a tiger.
I was like, it’s a tiger.”
The brothers had been fishing with eel bait, expecting just to catch a few sand sharks, he said.
Instead, they reeled in a bluish-gray tiger shark with horizontal stripes, about 5 feet long and weighing 40 pounds.
Rouette said it was a rare treat to see a “Southern warmer water species,” in familiar Cape waters.
According to John Chisholm, a shark researcher with the New England Aquarium, the presence of tiger sharks in Massachusetts waters is increasing every year as the water warms.
“These Southern species [are] slowly increasing their range north,” Chisholm said.
“Historically though, we’ve had tiger shark sightings going back decades, but they were rare.”
Chisholm, who helps track shark sightings, said juvenile tiger sharks have appeared near Cape Cod in the past four to five years, though it’s still more rare to catch one from the beach.
Just last week, Chisholm said, he got reports from Mashpee, not far from where Rouette and his brother were fishing, of a tiger shark eating the carcass of a leatherback turtle that had been killed by a boat.
After seeing pictures of Rouette’s catch Friday, Chisholm confirmed it was a tiger shark.
The catch comes almost a year to the day since local fisherman Hans Brings also caught a tiger shark off Mashpee, as reported at the time by Boston 25 News
Rouette agreed that as waters have warmed he has seen a wider variety of catches.
With a tiger shark, which are considered highly dangerous to humans, he and his brother wanted to be extra careful to get the hook out of its mouth and keep it wet while on the beach.
The next day at work, Rouette said his boss, head editor of On The Water magazine, was stunned when he saw a photo of the catch.
“Everyone said ‘that’s the catch of a lifetime on the Cape,’” Rouette recalled.
Bryan Hecht can be reached at bryan.hecht@globe.com.
Follow him on Instagram @bhechtjournalism.
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