Half-truths and great white lies

SHARKS are less dangerous than misunderstood.

Shark attack

JUST north of Redhead Beach near Newcastle, NSW, where a 44-year-old surfer this week became the latest victim of a seemingly endless summer of shark-attack fear, is one of the few known nursery areas for endangered great whites.

It is a hot spot for the juvenile "man-eaters", the dangers of which have been seared into public consciousness by Steven Spielberg's Hollywood blockbuster Jaws.

But the shark responsible for the non-fatal Redhead Beach attack is unlikely to have been a great white.

And despite the high numbers of sharks in the area and the fact that popular swimming beaches are located within the juvenile great white zone there has never been a reported great white attack.

"The area is well known. It extends from just north of Newcastle along Stockton Beach, up past the Port Stephens estuary and past Hawks Nest," says CSIRO shark expert Barry Bruce.

"It is along 50km of coastline and juvenile white sharks are common there during the spring and early to mid-summer period."

Bruce says the absence of shark attacks in what is known to be a shark hot spot underscores the difficulties in predicting where sharks may strike.

It fact, it highlights the poor state of knowledge into shark behaviour and habits in general.

The truth is the predatory behaviour of the ocean's most feared creatures is the subject more of half-truths and conjecture than scientific understanding.

Less uncertain is the public appetite for tales of danger from the deep. And a run of shark attacks over Christmas has made this summer of fear no exception.

Witnesses to the Redhead Beach incident say they saw a shark leap from the water to take a fish shortly before the attack, which happened at about 4.40pm.

Despite suffering severe wounds, the man managed to paddle to shore before being helped by fellow surfers and rushed to hospital in a serious condition.

The attack was followed by a bite to a 26-year-old surfer at Coral Bay, north of Port Hedland, yesterday and an incident earlier this month in which Michael Wells, 28, was attacked by a shark while surfing at North Avoca beach on the NSW central coast. He suffered a 5cm cut to his right forearm and a puncture wound to his right wrist.

And in Western Australia there have been three fatal shark attacks since August. Bodyboarder Kyle Burden was killed by a shark at Bunker Bay, 260km south of Perth, on August 4.

On October 9, businessman Bryn Martin was killed while swimming 500m off Perth's Cottesloe Beach. His body was never found, but his swimmers were retrieved from the ocean floor with tears consistent with a shark attack.

Two weeks later, on October 23, American George Thomas Wainwright died after being attacked by a shark while scuba diving off Rottnest Island. Wainwright's death sparked heated debate among West Australians after Fisheries Minister Norman Moore issued the state's first kill order against a shark.

Some called for a more widespread cull. Wainwright's sister Brenda reportedly said her ocean-loving brother would not have wanted the shark to be killed and he knew the risks when he entered the water.

But despite the macabre roll-call, the statistics do not show an increase in shark attacks and shark experts say anecdotal evidence of increasing shark numbers is at best unreliable.

Taronga Zoo shark expert John West says since 2001 there have been an average of 15 shark attacks a year, with fatalities averaging 1.4 a year. Last year, there were 12 shark attacks and four deaths.

West, co-ordinator of the Australian Shark Attack File at Taronga Conservation Society Australia has analysed the statistics to determine trends in unprovoked shark attacks since 1900, particularly over the past two decades.

He says the most significant indicator has been the change in the way people use the ocean.

"The rise in Australian shark attacks, from an average of 6.5 incidents per year from 1990 to 2000 to 15 incidents per year over the past decade, coincides with an increasing human population, more people visiting beaches, a rise in the popularity of water-based fitness and recreational activities and people accessing previously isolated coastal areas," West says.

He says there is no evidence of increasing shark numbers that would influence the rise of attacks in Australian waters.

And the risk of a fatality from shark attack in Australia remains low, with an average of 1.1 fatalities a year over the past 20 years.

The increase in shark attacks over the past two decades is consistent with international statistics of shark attacks increasing annually because of the greater numbers of people in the water.

The NSW great white nursery demonstrates the presence of sharks alone is not a good indicator of increased risk of attack.

Bruce says most interactions between sharks and humans in the ocean are without incident.

"There are many more interactions that happen between people and sharks on a regular basis and we are not aware of them because most interactions between people and sharks don't lead to attacks," Bruce says.

"It is only these odd occasions when something tragic happens. That's one of the things the public don't really have a feel for.

"We are almost conditioned to think that if there is a shark nearby it is going to bite somebody."

Christopher Neff, a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, who is conducting the first doctoral study of policy responses follow shark-bite incidents in Australia, South Africa and the US blames Hollywood.

Neff says the "rogue shark" theory began with a British Medical Journal article in 1899, which addressed a series of unexplained shark bites.

The article caught the attention of the shark researcher and Sydney surgeon Victor Coppleson, who developed the rogue shark theory in the 1940s and 50s. Although discredited by science the theory has found its way into the public consciousness.

"Shark behaviour is enormously complex," says Bruce. "They are not the killing machines that Hollywood and some documentaries would lead you to believe. They don't feed all the time and the frequency and what they look for depends on what they are feeding on.

"For instance, white sharks feed on seals for only a very small part of the year and it does not become part of their diet until the shark is at least 3m long.

"People talk about mistaken identity and how a shark mistook a surfer for a seal, but that is bollocks," Bruce says. "Particularly in the case of small sharks because they have not even started feeding on seals.The typical white shark you will find in the surf zone in NSW is 2 1/2m or below."

Bruce says white sharks are inquisitive and will investigate things on the surface but that does not add up to a case of mistaken identity.

"We are not even sure that shark attacks are motivated by the shark trying to eat something," Bruce says."

Equally unknown is the exact level of shark populations due to a lack of funding for non-commercial fish species.

"Many people will say that shark populations are increasing but the people who will tell you that generally don't have any information," Bruce says.

"It's really difficult to say what is going on because generally no one is counting.

"In most cases the data sets on commercial shark captures is getting better. In a lot of places we see declines in catches of commercial species but a lot of the species that are considered to be potentially dangerous are not well monitored by any program of work."

And while people may report increased shark sightings it is difficult to separate distribution from abundance.

Certainly any environmental event that increases the availability of baitfish in a particular area is

likely to attract predator sharks.

"But if people report an increase of sharks near the coast, that doesn't necessarily translate into there being a sudden increase in the population of sharks overall because sharks are highly mobile," Bruce says.

"When you have increases in the numbers of sharks in one area you will most likely see a corresponding decrease in another area.

"Some of these things can

be driven by movement change rather than population size."

And irrespective of what is happening to total shark numbers, Bruce says it is unrealistic to think it would be possible to reduce the risk of shark attack by culling shark numbers.

"You would have to go to a ridiculous extent to reduce what is already a really low-risk event," he says. "It is not practical. You cannot reduce the risk of shark attack to zero because there will always be sharks there."

Bruce says there are commonsense measures such as not swimming with big schools of bait fish. But he is sceptical about the theory that the risk of attack increases at dawn and dusk.

"People talk about not swimming at dawn and dusk, but from a pragmatic point of view the morning and evening are generally the times that people have available to them to go swimming.

"If you actually have a look at the shark attack statistics on a time-of-day basis there is a peak in mid-morning and a peak in mid-afternoon and a dip in the middle of the day and a low level of shark attack at dawn and dusk, believe it or not.

"But that doesn't tell us anything about what sharks are doing. It reflects what people are doing. That's the times that people are in the water and the reason there is a dip in the middle of the day is that is the time that people get out for lunch."

Bruce's advice is that it is better to swim with groups or at patrolled beaches. This is not because sharks are scared of crowds. Rather, he says, there is more chance of someone seeing approaching danger if you are together.