'Sharks Don't Want To Attack Us'

May 16, 2008

Release from: John Yeld
Cape Argus (South Africa)

Great white sharks swimming in water as shallow as 1,5m off popular beaches such as Fish Hoek and Muizenberg in high summer appear to go out of their way to avoid bathers, says shark researcher Alison Kock.

She also warned that poaching of this protected species - correctly called white sharks - appeared to be increasing, and that there had been a "definite" increase in the number of sharks encountered with fishing gear stuck in their mouths over the past three years.

There was also an as yet unquantified by-catch of great whites by foreign fishing vessels targeting Blue and Mako sharks off Cape Point, and by sport fishermen on False Bay beaches who were targeting Bronze Whaler sharks but whose gear, bait and fishing methods resulted in them catching great whites.

"That's a huge problem at the moment," she said.

Kock, a PhD student at the University of Cape Town who is working at the Shark Research Centre at the Iziko-South African Museum, was speaking at a shark and ray workshop in Simon's Town yesterday.

The three-day workshop, which has attracted some of the world's top shark scientists, is part of celebrations to mark last night's opening of the new Save Our Seas Shark Centre in Kalk Bay.

The centre is sponsored by the Switzerland-based, non-profit Save Our Seas Foundation, which aims to "encourage awareness, protection and preservation of the global marine environment through research and education".

The research centre, which was started by world-renowned shark expert Dr Lenard Compagno when he was still at the then JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology at Rhodes University in 1986, will move to the new Kalk Bay centre when Compagno retires from the museum at the end of this year.

He will be chief scientist, Kock will be marine biologist, and the centre will be managed by, Lesley Rochat, executive director and founder of the AfriOceans Conservation Alliance.

Kock, who has researched great whites in False Bay for the past four years, said there was still a healthy population of this species here, although there had been "significant declines" in shark populations worldwide.

She has already identified 300 individual great whites from photographs, using notches on the trailing end of the dorsal fin as one of the key identifying characteristics.

"And I'm definitely still counting, so we really have a good population (in False Bay)," she said.

She has also tagged 75 great whites, 49 females, 24 males and two of unknown gender, with transmitters whose signals are recorded by 35 receivers placed strategically around False Bay when the sharks swim past. So far, more than 500 000 detections have been recorded by the receivers.

Kock said the tagging had proved very successful - some tags had stayed on for three years, with the average being 228 days, and had revealed a "very strong" seasonal presence of sharks around Seal Island in winter, and swimming close inshore, parallel to the coast, during the high summer months.

One great white tracked for four days had swum back and forth off Muizenberg in water between 2m and 16m deep and between 200m and 2km offshore, at an average speed of 4km/h.

Another great white, a massive 5m long and the biggest shark tagged during 2006, had been recorded swimming in water just 1.5m deep in Fish Hoek bay.

"It seems as if white sharks go out of their way to avoid people. If they'd wanted to, there would be an attack daily, and there simply isn't," she said.