Shark Spotting: Fin By Fin

August 1, 2007

Release from: Andy Greenwood
ThisIsCornwall.com (UK)

Wildlife experts in the Westcountry remain incredulous at claims that a Great White shark has been spotted off the region's coast, after details of new "sightings" were reported yesterday.

The alleged video footage of the predator off St Ives has thrust the coastal town into the international media spotlight.

But the claims have left hugely sceptical experts exasperated, particularly after reports yesterday suggested that the sighting had been "confirmed".

Conservationist Richard Peirce, chairman of the Shark Trust, has poured scorn on both of the videos that have been produced as "evidence" of great whites in Cornish waters.

"I would hesitate to confirm anything from the first clip, even a basking shark, because it is just not clear enough," said Mr Peirce, who lives in Bude, North Cornwall.

"The second one is a basking shark and I'm completely baffled that someone could misidentify that as a Great White, let alone conclude that it is a female from its dorsal fin."

Mr Peirce said he was "relieved" that the public were not taking the story seriously. But he believed the "tragedy" was that the attention was being diverted away from real conservation issues facing threatened shark species.

The experts said the fact the creature was not a Great White could be established by checking its dorsal fin.

Basking shark fins are brown - compared with the grey of a Great White - and also convex at the back. The rear of a great white fin is concave.

Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, a biodiversity policy officer with the Marine Conservation Society, said: "All this hullabaloo is just nonsense at the moment.

"The first video could have been anything - a whale, dolphins, or a basking shark because it is just too grainy to see. The second one is clearly a basking shark. The fin shape for one doesn't look like that of a white shark.

"We have seen hundreds of hours of footage of basking sharks and that's what it is unfortunately."

Shark scientist Dr David Sims, of the Plymouth-based Marine Biological Association, believes the first video showed a pod of dolphins or porpoises.

"Just because Parliament has gone into recess does not make this a Great White shark," he told The Guardian. "Those clips provide no evidence that there is a Great White shark.

"We have been studying sharks for 12 years and in all that time we have never seen a Great White. With the frequency that tourists supposedly spot them, you might think we would have seen one by now."

Colin Speedie, who has been watching basking sharks since the late 1980s and actively researching them since 1999, said most species of shark found in UK waters were readily identifiable with a little research.

He said there were several clues - mainly behaviour and size - to correctly identifying sharks and cetaceans while at sea. "It is chiefly about the animals' behaviour," Mr Speedie explained. "A basking shark, for example, will stay at the surface and swim along on a level plane in the water. It is not going up and down to breathe, which would identify it as a cetacean.

"Dolphin fins are curved backwards, like a falcon's wing. In comparison, porpoises are tiny and they have just a stubby little fin.

"A porbeagle, which is a pretty chunky shark, may come up to the surface to have an exploratory poke around. Blue sharks are similar and from time to time we have had good numbers of them around the Cornish coast."

Mr Speedie said the public were most likely to spot basking sharks off the region's coast and stressed that sightings of other sharks were very rare.

He added: "It is very difficult to believe that these pictures are of a Great White because they are so completely different from what they look like."