Whale carcass lures Great White to WA south coast near Albany

MAKE no mistake, Jaws is out there. And we have a picture to prove it. Weighing a whopping 1600kg, this great white’s lurking in waters too close for comfort.

Sad end ... the beached humpback whale that died of natural causes at Albany's Emu Point

MAKE no mistake, Jaws is out there. And we have a picture to prove it.

This photo shows the size of a great white shark tagged twice by Fisheries Department officers last month.

The female has been detected lurking off West Australia’s south coast prompting a caution to swimmers to beware.

The 5-metre shark was detected near Albany at the weekend when a distressed whale beached itself.

Local beaches were closed to allow the removal of the carcass but the monster shark is believed to have remained in the area.

Mark Kleeman, from the Department of Fisheries, said the great white has been detected regularly near Albany since it was fitted with an internal acoustic tag last month.

Beat that ... the 5-metre great white shark lurking in WA’s south coast.

It was last detected at Ellen Cove, near one of the city’s popular swimming beaches, at 5.44am (WST) yesterday.

Mr Kleeman said swimmers near Albany should be cautious for the next few days.

“Obviously with that whale incidence and the distress signals that would have sent out, it would have attracted sharks and they will probably frequent the beach on and off for the next few days,” he added.

The female is believed to be the biggest shark internally tagged in Australia. It weighed about 1600kg and was longer than the beached whale.

The shark was measured at 5.04m to the fork in its tail, suggesting an overall length of around 5.3m.

It took three Fisheries staff two-and-a-half hours to subdue the shark, which was hooked close to Mistaken Island in around 15 metres of water on March 30.

The same shark had been externally tagged the previous Wednesday when it approached a Fisheries vessel close to Limestone Head, and then set off receivers at Ellen Cove on the following Thursday and Friday, leading to beach closures.

The great white took a salmon bait, culminating in it being fitted with an internal tag to help monitor its movements for up to 10 years.

WA has a catch-and-kill policy for great white, tiger and bull sharks larger than 3 metres that come close to certain beaches.

The cull, which involves setting baited drum lines off five Perth beaches and two in the south west, was started after a spike in fatal shark attacks in the past 10 years.

Albany does not have baited drum lines off the coast.

Federal Government approval for the cull ends after this month, but the WA government has proposed extending the cull until 2017.

Drumlines have so far caught at least 104 sharks, including 101 tiger sharks, with 40 either found dead or destroyed, figures released earlier this month show.

Sea Shepherd Australia, a non-profit conservation organisation which aims to end the destruction of habitat and the slaughter of wildlife in the ocean, also recently failed in its bid to secure a Supreme Court injunction to force the WA government to suspend the cull.

The trial runs until April 30.