Mary Lee, Great White Shark Celebrity, Headed Toward NYC (UPDATES)

NEW YORK, NY — Mary Lee, the great white shark celebrity with more than 110,000 followers on Twitter, was detected roughly 20 miles off the coast of Belmar, NJ, and around 30 miles south of the Rockaways in Queens around noon Friday, according to OCEARCH, an environmental org that implants trackers in dozens of sharks.

UPDATE, Monday, July 5: Mary Lee headed inland to the New Jersey coastline over the weekend, and has been lingering near the shore between Point Pleasant Beach and Long Beach Island for a couple days now. Her last ping was at 10:10 a.m. Monday around 70 miles south of NYC. You can track her exact location here. Patch's original story on her arrival to NYC waters, posted last Friday afternoon, continues below.

If the 16-foot, 3,500-pound social media sensation continues on the path she's been swimming thus far at her usual speed, she could reach the waters off New York City by late Saturday morning.

This is the furthest Mary Lee has swum up the Atlantic Coast in the past year.

In the past, Mary Lee has generally kept her distance from New York bathing areas. The closest she's ever gotten to an NYC beach is around 5 miles out, according to tracking data recorded since fall 2012.

She has, however, had a few close run-ins in southern states, the data shows.

OCEARCH expedition leader Chris Fischer, who named Mary Lee after his mom, has called the shark "truly the most historic and legendary fish I have ever been a part of."

Follow Mary Lee as she makes her way up the coast — and a bunch of other great whites — on the OCEARCH website.

Mary Lee has swum nearly 40,000 miles from Cape Cod all the way down to the Bahamas since being caught and tagged around five years back.

Photos courtesy of OCEARCH