“No appetite” for Great White cull in WA after 2200% increase in attacks

“Some uncomfortable truths exist about sharks that kill humans.”

Four days back, one of Western Australia’s most decorated journalists pushed back against the ol narrative that any Great White attack is entirely accidental, they don’t got hands so gotta have a little fiddle with their teeth, and that any increase, unprecedented or not, is due to maybe increase numbers of people using the ocean or whatever.

After three fatal Great White attacks in WA this year, as well a surfer losing his leg one month back, journalist Bret Christian, wrote that “some uncomfortable truths exist about sharks that kill humans.”

His central claim concerned a 2016 tracking study, which he wrote showed the same three tagged sharks repeatedly returning to metropolitan beaches. He asked whether the finding had been played down because it could create pressure to remove protected animals. Christian also drew on the “rogue shark” theory where a few Great Whites are doin’ the killing.

“Academics join others who poo-poo the ‘rogue shark’ theory and campaign heavily against removing sharks for ‘revenge’, though this would at least eliminate the possibility that the same shark may return and endanger others,” Christian writes.

In the aftermath of the fatal attack of a swimmer at Sorrento, the man eaten whole, the state’s former chief fisheries scientist, Jimmy Pen, called for an independent review of the population’s size and long-term trends.

Penn linked the likely growth to surging prey, including salmon, migrating humpback whales and expanding fur seal colonies, some of which lie near recent fatal attack sites at Rottnest Island and Albany. Ignoring that food supply, he told a local newspaper, “defies biological logic.”

He said that before protection Great White numbers were kept “reasonable” due to the by catch of shark gill net fishermen.

“So it was culling by a different angle, and that needs to be reintroduced,” he told newspapermen. “If you go back in history, for the 30 years prior to them being protected, there was one shark attack in Western Australia. In the 30 years since, there’s been now 22, so a 22-fold increase. But that’s been ignored, if you like, for reasons of political correctness.”

With beaches becoming increasingly off limits and ocean swimmers now doin’ their circuits in waist-deep water, you think it might’ve been time for the government to a little dirty work and start icing near-shore Great Whites.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Fisheries Minister Jackie Jarvis formally rejected any idea of killing Great Whites and, instead, and like NSW, the state gov will invest five-and-a-half million in drones, helicopter patrols, shark tagging, shark monitoring network receives and to do a little research on alternative tech.

“I don’t think that there is an appetite to start culling a shark when we have spent a few decades bringing it back from extinction,” Jarvis said.