99% of Sharks Never Touch Them – So Why Do Shark Nets Actually Work?

"If you want to save lives, net your local beach."

This story is about the phantom menace of shark nets. Yeah. Shark nets.

Listen: shark nets are completely misunderstood.

Despite decades of utterly convincing statistical evidence that shark nets work* most punters love to pontificate that they are ineffective.

The average punter thinks of shark nets as an incompetent physical barrier between the shark and humans. The nets are derided due to the fact that these oceanic beasts are able to simply swim around the mesh as they hunt our beaches.

SHARK NETS ARE EFFECTIVE BUT NOT AS A COMPLETE PHYSICAL BARRIER

The initial placement of nets kill many sharks in an area and the sharks, who obviously struggle to recognise the threat of the floating death the nets represent, then creates a culturally systemic fear of that area amongst the remaining shark population.

How does this work?

Sharks obviously have a means of communication that our empirical understanding of their world has yet to qualify. They meet to spawn and often hunt in coordinated schools. More importantly they express messages of concern to each other regarding potential threats in an area.

Consider the incident of the much-studied Great White sharks of Neptune Islands, South Australia. These sharks have been subject to commercial cage diving activities for decades and it was stunning when word spread of an orca attack on a White in the area which then prompted the remaining sharks to immediately disperse from the zone. Even the sharks who were not present during the orca attack somehow became aware of the killing and vanished. Gone. It took quite a while for the Whites to venture back to the area.

How did the sharks share the concept of what had happened? I suspect it’s either a chemical or electrical signal emitted by the sharks.

Point being that the sharks that were not present during the attack had fled through the idea of threat being relayed between individuals.

And that’s how the shark nets work.

The sharks die in numbers when the nets are first deployed as they don’t truly appreciate what they are swimming toward and can’t quite identify it as a threat. A few sharks die and the shark network relays the idea of the unidentified threat that is present in the netted area and warns other sharks to show caution and avoid the area as much as possible.

The nets create a phantom menace that holds sway over the shark population to a large degree. Of course the illusion of omnipresent death does not deter all sharks and that’s why some Whites may still enter the jetted zones on occasion.

The nets work. It’s just that people don’t comprehend how or why they work. If you want to save lives…..net your local beach.

*Ongoing shark control programs have been very successful in reducing the incidence of shark attack at the protected beaches.[3][22][4] In the years from 1900 to 1937, 13 people died off New South Wales surf beaches after shark attacks; over the next 72 years, the death rate fell to eight, only one of which was at a meshed beach. This in a period when the New South Wales human population rose from 1.4 million to seven million — and when more people began going to the beach.[16]

In Queensland, there has been only one fatal attack on a controlled beach since 1962, compared to 27 fatal attacks between 1919 and 1961. Statistics from the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries indicate that before nets were introduced in New South Wales in 1936 there was an average of one fatal shark attack every year. There has been only one fatal attack on a protected beach since then and that was in 1951. (Wikipedia)