WELLFLEET, Mass. (AP) — From a nature lover's perspective, it is a wonder to be in the water and have a seal pop up, or see a gray streamlined body shoot by in pursuit of fish. But the reality is the seals are being hunted as well and great white sharks have repeatedly been spotted in very shallow water near shore, even attacking seals in areas close to where people swim and surf.

"Their movements are really dynamic and they can be very, very close to shore, within range of anyone who is swimming," said state Division of Marine Fisheries shark researcher Greg Skomal. Seeing them in shallow water is not an anomaly, Skomal said. "We've been seeing them there right along."

Long Beach, California Marine Safety Chief Joe Bailey had a similar shark problem. Although they'd never had any confirmed great white sightings along the 1-mile stretch of beaches he oversees, earlier this spring Bailey received a video showing a couple of sharks in the breakers at Surfside Beach. Local shark expert Chris Lowe of California State University, Long Beach, identified them as juvenile great whites.

According to their shark policy, Bailey had to post a warning as long as the sharks were present. He sent a pair of lifeguards out each day on a personal watercraft to see whether the sharks were still there, but that tied up valuable personnel for hours, and often they weren't high enough off the water to view beneath the surface glare to depths where great whites spend the vast majority of their time.

That's when Bailey decided to go with a drone.

In a half hour, his crew could drive down to the beach, launch the quadcopter and take a video survey of the water that played out live on a tablet on shore.

The drone flies at 150 to 170 feet. If the spotter watching the screen sees a dark spot, the controller flies lower to get a close-up. While Lowe believed the sharks would leave after a couple of weeks, in over a month of surveillance flights, the drone has found great whites, sometimes as many as a dozen, in the shallow waters where waves are breaking. After reviewing the footage, Lowe told him they were all juveniles that were too small to hunt seals and therefore unlikely to attack humans.

Bailey could post warnings, but did not have to close beaches.

"In all the time I worked here, we never had a confirmed sighting of a great white shark, but now with the drone we know they are there," Bailey said. "A big part of my job is education, like educating people to the dangers of rip currents. I feel like the shark thing is the same thing. Sure, people say they don't want to know they are there, but from our perspective a better educated public is the way to go."

Vincent Harris, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Northeastern University, believes that drones are a good, and relatively inexpensive, way to patrol the Cape's beaches as well.

"My personal feeling is that drones are here to stay," said Harris, who does classified research on drone technology for the military.

"They will use them routinely at beaches (that have) shark visits and attacks," he added.

Harris said researchers at Northeastern were already at work on sophisticated software that would allow the drone to differentiate sharks from other marine species and alert marine safety personnel. It may take another three to five years of research and testing, but a pattern recognition program could allow a drone to fly a predetermined route on its own looking for shark shapes. When it finds one, the drone would drop down for a closer look and send an alert out to a beach administrator and lifeguards who could see the shark up close on a laptop or smartphone, know its location, and make a decision on whether it is a threat or just passing by.

"It is remarkably affordable," Harris said. Bailey paid $1,400 for his DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter, about $400 for an iPad, and $100 for a backup battery.

Accelerometers that gauge the tilt of each arm of the copters keep them level, Harris said, and even off-the-shelf models sport high-definition cameras with polarized lenses that can peer 3 to 4 feet beneath the surface in even murky water or whitecaps. They have a range of about a mile depending on weather and the strength of the Global Positioning System signal from satellites used in navigation. Harris said he thought the drone surveillance for beaches did not have to wait for the new software but could be in use right now.

"This is very easy technology to implement. You don't have to be an expert and the user learning curve is very straightforward for this kind of mission," Harris said.

But there are limitations. Quadcopters do not fly well in winds over 20 mph and have a battery life of about 20 to 30 minutes depending on weather conditions. Plus, there is the sense that having a toy buzzing overhead may detract from the beach experience, particularly in the more pristine beaches of the Cape Cod National Seashore and the Outer Cape. Plus, the National Park Service has implemented a ban on flying drones within park boundaries nationwide unless the user has a special permit approved by the main office in Washington.

Seashore Park Superintendent George Price said the ban arose after a number of incidents that provoked concerns about personal privacy and interference with wildlife activities, especially endangered shorebirds like the piping plover. Still, Price had safety concerns about sharks.

"One of the things we've learned is that quite often sharks are in the surf and probably have been around our swimmers for a real long time," he said. The Seal Beach drone experience intrigued him and he said the special permit process could potentially be used to test it out.

"I'd be curious to learn more about what the people in California are doing and what the success rate is," Price said.

Skomal said the noise is minimal when flying at higher altitudes and could be masked by beach sounds like the surf and crowd noise. Plus, people may be willing to tolerate it if they feel an added level of security. Skomal has seen drones employed during filming by the Discovery Channel of his shark tagging off the Outer Cape.

"They're pretty versatile and incredible. They are probably a viable way to detect an animal," Skomal said, especially with pattern recognition software.

"The optics are already good. You can clearly see the sharks," he said, but flight duration of 10 to 20 minutes and the logistics of having to frequently change batteries were limitations. They were not going to replace a spotter plane, Skomal said, which can travel the coastline for hours at a time looking for sharks, but they would probably work well within a limited area, like the lifeguarded areas where most people swim.

"I'm definitely interested," said Wellfleet Beach Administrator Suzanne Grout Thomas. "I think it's impossible to know that they (sharks) are there."

It makes a difference in terms of getting swimmers out of the water whether a great white was positioned at the surf line or further offshore, swimming by on its way to seal haul-out areas in Truro. She sees deployment of drones, if it happens, as a regional effort due to conservation and wildlife concerns of individual towns and the special permit process required to get around the National Park ban.

"There has to be a discussion with neighboring towns and the Seashore so that we're all agreed to the same process," Thomas said. "If the Seashore wants to discuss their use, that's definitely a conversation I'd like to have."