BOSTON — Great white sharks are discovering what tourists have known for years: Cape Cod is a great place to spend the summer.

Greg Skomal, the top shark expert at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, says the latest data from a multiyear study of the ocean predators found that the number of sharks in waters off the vacation haven appears to be on the rise.

But that’s no reason to cancel vacation. The sharks are after seals, not humans. The last documented fatal great white shark attack in Massachusetts waters was in 1936.

Researchers using a plane and boats spotted 147 individual sharks last summer.

That’s up slightly from 2015, but significantly more than the 80 individual sharks spotted in 2014, the first year of the study.

First Published March 12, 2017, 12:57 p.m.