Published in The Australian, 22 April 2017
The protection of great white sharks was introduced in Australia when nobody in the world knew the species’ global population, says one of the co-authors of the federal government’s plan to replenish the species in 2002.
One could argue that this is still the case. Despite decades of expensive research, precious little is known about shark abundance and behaviour, which is why every time there is an attack we have the same futile debate.
It gets worse. It turns out Australia was emphatically told the debate was ill-informed in 2004, when a Japanese fishing official strongly objected to our successful application to increase worldwide protection of great whites. The official argued that the application was based on insufficient evidence and failed to consider the potential of increasing attacks on people.
At a meeting of the 22 Australian researchers contributing to the Great White Recovery Plan in 2002, the CSIRO’s chief shark researcher at the time, John Stevens, who has since retired, was asked whether he knew the size of the species’ global population.
“He was not in a position to answer it because the research had not been done,” says Geoff McPherson, who represented the Queensland Department of Primary Industries at the meeting.
McPherson says the group’s most reliable source of information was the number of sharks being caught in nets at popular beaches off NSW and Queensland. From 1962 to 1982, these nets averaged about 20 a year. For each of the next 20 years, they caught about 10.
McPherson says this was only an “index” of the population, and “every index has issues”.
“But it was the only one we had. Nobody in the world had any idea of the global population. People were suggesting that the global population was declining, but in terms of absolute numbers, nobody had any idea.”
The Great White Recovery Plan says a greater number of sharks were probably being killed by the fishing industry, either accidentally in longlines or deliberately because of sharks becoming a “nuisance”.
However, the plan seems to contradict itself regarding the effect the fishing industry was having on the great white population at the time. It says there was an urgent need to identify “the full extent of the impact the commercial fishing industry has on the Australian population of white sharks”, but then insists protection was necessary because great whites were “under pressure from the Australian commercial fishing industry”.
Around the same time, Australia successfully applied to have great whites listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
CITES put great whites in its appendix III, the least serious group, where nations seek co-operation from each other to “prevent unsustainable or illegal exploitation”. Two years later, in 2004, Australia successfully applied to have great whites shifted to appendix II, for “species that are not necessarily now threatened with extinction but that may become so unless trade is closely controlled”.
This was strongly opposed by Masayuki Komatsu, then director of resources and environment with the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, who said “it was highly unlikely that international trade is adversely affecting the survival of this species”.
He also said “no global population assessment of this species has been carried out”.
Contacted by Inquirer this week, Masayuki said he believed great whites were not endangered.
“To my knowledge, I don’t think so at this point,” he said over the phone from Tokyo. “I believe there is no evidence to support them (being) endangered.”
While declining to say whether protection of great whites should be lifted, he did say “overprotection” was bad for the environment.
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“Every fish and every marine creature is very much important,” he said. “We shouldn’t extinguish any fish species or plant. (But) they shouldn’t be exclusively protected — that would be unbalancing the ecology of the oceans. You should protect it for the purpose of sustainability. But overprotection is damaging to other fish and even to human beings.”
He said the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation offered a better strategy than CITES for managing species such as great whites.
Under the FAO’s international action plan for sharks, which was already in place at the time of the original CITES application, countries were allowed to tailor their policies to suit local conditions.
“It’s up to each national government to write a plan of action in accordance with the international plan of action,” Masayuki said. “You can make an objective judgment, and put in local information like incidental catches or attacks on people.”
Now, because of our commitment to CITES, Australian state governments cannot implement strategies to reduce the threat of attacks from great whites without federal government approval.
Western Australia was granted permission to deploy drum lines for a 14-week trial off beaches around Perth and the southwest in 2014, and killed 68 sharks.
Similarly, NSW has been granted permission for a six-month trial of nets off the shark hot spot of Ballina, on the state’s north coast, which is due to end soon. Surfers and ocean lovers are nervous the net will be pulled at the end of the trial, just as the whale season begins.
Federal approval to deploy drum lines around Esperance was offered by Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg following the attack there this week, most likely by a great white, that killed 17-year-old Laeticia Brouwer while she was surfing with her father at Wylie Bay, but the state government rejected the offer.
Inquirer this week asked Frydenberg, for a second time, when, if ever, protection of great whites might be lifted but was told a decision rested with the department’s threatened species committee.
The Great White Recovery Plan mentions one of the seminal books on the topic of sharks in Australia, Shark Attack, by Victor Marcus Coppleson (1893-1965), published in 1958. Coppleson, a surgeon, was knighted in 1964, mostly for his services to medicine.
“He recounted many attacks in Australia and elsewhere and particularly the war experiences of downed airmen and shipwreck survivors,” the plan says. “These accounts captured the fear that people have of shark attack.”
Indeed they did. That debate, between those who think sharks are a menace and those who believe they are just another hazard of everyday life, has changed little since. It broke out again in Perth this week when the Senate environment committee’s inquiry into shark mitigation was conducting public hearings.
Liberal senator Linda Reynolds was asking Surf Life Saving WA general manager Chris Peck if he had researched the implications of shark attacks when the committee chairman, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, interrupted. “You’ve asked the question,” he said, then asked Peck how many drownings his organisations had to deal with each year. Peck replied that it was 14 and rising.
Whish-Wilson sardonically pointed out that “it would help” those cases if each received four successive days of extensive coverage from the local newspaper, as the most recent fatal attack had.
Reynolds described this as a “disgraceful, disgraceful” attempt to understate shark fatalities, and was intended to “undermine” her role on the committee. “You deserve an Academy Award for that,” Whish-Wilson replied.
Coppelson’s book might be a relic from a less “enlightened” era, but its pages reveal how narrow our curiosity into the topic has become. He argues the case for the existence of “rogue” sharks that have developed a taste for humans, and the ocean conditions that are common to attacks. He draws a band around the globe parallel with the Equator where the water is above the “critical temperature of about 70F (21C)”.
This is corroborated by former Ballina, shark fisherman David Woods, who gave up fishing recently after government restrictions made the business unviable.
“Sharks feed when the water temperature increases,” he says. “When it decreases they slow their metabolism down and they don’t feed as much.”
Woods says that if the temperature dipped to 20C, he would catch maybe one shark on his 30 lines. But when warmer currents ran, and the temperature rose to 24C-27C, he would reap a bumper crop of large tiger sharks.
Talking to Inquirer yesterday, Woods said no researcher had ever approached him to ask about his 20 years of experience working with large lethal sharks.
He was disparaging of “people with PhDs” who got all their knowledge from books. “You watch what’s going to happen in five years’ time,” he said. The juvenile sharks now occupying northern NSW would be 4m long by then, and “Australia will be the shark attack capital of the world”.
Such pessimism about the dangers of sharks, and the pragmatism to deal with them, were not on display at the Senate hearing in Perth yesterday. “We are both fearful and fascinated by our monsters,” professor Jessica Meeuwig, of the University of Western Australia, told the hearing.
She said the fear was based on the prospect of becoming prey, and the fascination was an attempt to avoid doing so. She attributed these survival instincts to our “lower brains”.
She then said lethal methods for managing sharks were “dumb … ineffective, counter-productive, woefully arrogant and socially shortsighted”. She cited “good data” from Queensland, NSW and Hawaii that “shows there has been no reduction in the incidents of attacks” when lethal methods, such as nets and drum lines, are used.
The data suggests this is not the case. In Queensland, there has been one fatality at a protected beach in 50 years; the same applies to NSW, where nets were first installed in 1936.
If academics want to make themselves useful, rather than pontificate about other people’s supposed arrogance, they might like to revive Coppleson’s long dormant inquiry into the topic of shark attack severity.
Despite what many researchers say, humans are, and have always been, attractive to great whites and other large sharks. What has never been academically investigated is why some attacks are horrifically prolonged while others end with minor bites or no injury at all.
If we must live with more sharks, as researchers insist we do, the least they can do is investigate the factors affecting the severity of attacks. Unlike most other research, this would generate information that is useful to the people most seriously affected.
