Revealed: “Greedy, misanthropic, grossly overweight” plus-sized sharks consuming up to 70% of Queensland fishermen’s daily catch!

"Gimme, gimme."

These Coronavirus days are very anxiety-inducing. Very strange yet odd but there has been much joy, inspiration, folded into the general terror. People looking out for other people. People helping other people. People caring about other people.

Animals getting in on the general benevolence too.

Therapy dogs allowing themselves to be petted for comfort. Therapy tigers performing tricks for Russian oligarch children and putting smiles on their faces.

It is very close to an earthly paradise minus Chinese-made diseases and large sharks eating Australia’s Queenslander fishermen’s entire daily catch, minus 30%.

An unbelievable amount of rudeness in these days already fraught times.

According to Michael Thompson, who represents many fishermen, “As every single commercial fisherman that works out there — that’s line fishermen — will tell you, from the border of Queensland right to the tip of Queensland, there’s massive shark problems on the entire coastline. We’ve still got a great fishery, we can still go and catch or hook multiple fish — the fish are there. We just cannot bring them to the boat because the sharks are taking them. We have up to 30 following us at any one time and they’re getting bigger to what they were in previous years — eight to nine-foot sharks.

Not satisfied with fish intended for sale, the greedy, misanthropic sharks are also targeting men and women out on the high seas for a little bit of fun. Charter boat operator Luke Truant says a significant amount of fish are getting “sharked.

“We might lose 58 out of 60 fish,” he said and is calling for the government to reconsider laws preventing fishers from taking sharks more than 1.5 metres long.

“I want the legislation to change so we can harvest sharks in proportion to fish.”

A fine idea?

Associate Professor of Environmental Management at Bond University, Dr Daryl McPhee, says, “No.”

“The issue with market acceptance of large sharks is just the taste and texture. They certainly don’t rank as something that is particularly tasty.”

And how entirely unthoughtful.

First sharks eat all of our fish and then they have the audacity to taste bad, with bad texture themselves.

Not inspirational.

Extremely disturbing.