Why is no one in authority addressing our shark crisis? (paywalled)
Fred Pawle
The Australian
February 6, 2021
Traditional preparations for a trip up the Australian coast involved throwing towels, boards, bathers and sunscreen into the car and heading off.
But in these more enlightened times, it’s advisable to also download a shark-alert app to your phone and pack the sort of first-aid equipment that you’d normally only find in a military medic’s backpack.
A group of Australian and South African surfers last year formed a company that produces a kit containing latex gloves, tourniquets, a heat blanket and bandages. It costs $160 but might just save a life.
Their company is called Calm As, which ironically describes the way our politicians and researchers are addressing the shark crisis.
In the past year, there have been eight confirmed deaths by shark attack in Australia. But the actual figure is almost certainly nine, after a young father disappeared while snorkelling in South Australia this month. Other less serious attacks, close calls and sightings are impossible to quantify. Neither is the anguish endured by the thousands of parents of young surfers in the increasing number of shark hot spots along our otherwise glorious coastline.
This toll has done nothing to alarm Australia’s clique of shark researchers, whose concern for human life is matched or even exceeded by their concern for the welfare of sharks and other marine life.
Last month two of Australia’s leading shark researchers, Daryl Mcphee of Bond University and Victor Peddemors of the NSW Department of Primary Industries, published a report that confirmed it’s business as usual.
The report is catchily titled “A comparison of alternative systems to catch and kill for mitigating unprovoked shark bite on bathers or surfers at ocean beaches”, which in layman’s terms translates to “Seeking funds for research while ignoring proven ways to prevent people being killed by sharks”.
Australia already has one of the world’s most efficient, cheapest and effective methods of preventing shark attacks, or “shark bites”, as Mcphee and Peddemors prefer to call them.
The Queensland shark management program, which catches and kills sharks that stray into popular beaches, has been in operation since 1962. It currently costs about $3.5m a year. Queensland has recorded only two fatalities at a protected beach. The most recent was of a surfer at Snapper Rocks last year.
The program has not destroyed the state’s marine ecology. But it barely rates a mention in Mcphee and Peddemors’ report, other than to note it is “highly controversial”.
“There is a recognised need to use non-lethal methods including new technologies that provide for enhanced safety and peace-of-mind for beach users, while reducing or eliminating significant environmental impact,” they say.
This “recognised need” is based on three studies into community attitudes, the most recent of which was 2018, 10 fatalities ago. Their findings do not concur with the correspondence I have for years received from surfers and fishermen around the nation.
Surfers are being spooked by increasingly regular sightings and close encounters, and fishermen are losing a significant proportion of their catches to the dozens of sharks that have learned to follow their boats for an easy feed. (Yet conservationists and researchers continue to insist sharks are “apex predators”.)
Instead of lauding the Queensland program, Mcphee and Peddemors talk up expensive non-lethal alternatives.
One of these methods is electronic deterrents, which irritate the sensors in sharks’ snouts called the ampullae of Lorenzini. These devices “have been found to deter sharks (albeit not 100 per cent of the time),” they say.
Not 100 per cent? It’s a lot lower than that. The most recent study into the devices, published in December, found the best electrical device, called the Surf +, deterred great whites in only 60 per cent of approaches. Worse, the sharks “become acclimatised to the deterrent through habituation”, meaning their effectiveness decreases.
The West Australian government spent almost $1m on subsidies for these devices before this research was conducted. Meanwhile, Mcphee and Peddemors say research, costing far more than the already proven Queensland management program, is “ongoing”.
None of the recent research adequately explains the increase in attacks and sightings. A paper looking at population size of great whites off the east coast, published in December by the NSW DPI and University of Queensland, “agrees with previous studies that report stability of population size”.
Over the past five years, I’ve asked four successive federal environment ministers when Australia’s beach users might expect the protection of great whites, which has been in place since 1999, will be lifted.
The answer has always been the same. “The white shark is listed nationally as a threatened species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 in the Vulnerable category,” Minister Sussan Ley’s spokesman told me in an email in November. “There has been no data brought forward to suggest the listing should be changed and there has been no application for it to be reassessed.”
Neither has there been data brought forward that adequately explains the alarming size and proliferation of these lethal animals at our beaches and offshore fishing areas.
Great Whites have been protected since 1999. Picture: Al McGlashan
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