Mary Lee is a sixteen-foot, 3,500-pound great white shark tagged by oceanographers off the coast of Cape Cod in 2012. The transmitter attached to her dorsal fin could be tracked by satellite when she surfaced. For the next five years Mary Lee’s movements were observed online with great interest by everyone from researchers to surfers, up and down the east coast of the United States from Maine to Florida. She was tracked for nearly 40,000 miles until one day, somewhere off the coast of New Jersey, her signal stopped—probably because the battery on her transmitter expired.

Human knowledge and technology reach…