Shark nets and fishing hooks risk killing off endangered species,Activists want shark nets removed in places like Bondi, where it was originally designed to kill the animals rather than shepherd them away from swimmers.
Shark nets and fishing hooks risk killing off endangered species
About 100 metres off the point between Tamarama and Bondi Beach, beneath a light cloud of tawny-coloured jelly-blubbers and a thick shoal of yellowtail scad, two grey nurse sharks sheltered under a rock overhang on Saturday morning.
They were oblivious to the free-divers struggling to hold their breath long enough to take clear photos of them 10 metres beneath the swell.
Two young grey nurse sharks amid a school of fish 10 metres underwater off the headland at South Bondi on Saturday.Credit:Duncan Heuer & Edwina Pickles
The sharks were young, both smaller than two metres long, and presented no threat despite the fierce-looking teeth that once led them to be killed on sight.
So many were killed, and their breeding cycle so slow, that the timid creatures are now critically endangered in NSW.
Although protected by law, grey nurse sharks are still injured internally by fishing hooks and drowned in nets such as the one that kills so many large sea animals each year a few hundred metres away, at Bondi Beach.
The Bondi net was first designed to kill sharks rather than just keep them away from swimmers.
Little is known about the animal, which is why recreational and commercial divers were counting its numbers up and down Australia’s east coast on Saturday. The first co-ordinated census of the grey nurse targeted known “aggregation sites”, from Wolf Rock in south Queensland to Montague Island in south NSW.
Leading the Bondi expedition was Duncan Heuer, who is part of a group behind the Saving Norman website, which is campaigning for the removal of the Bondi shark net, a project now backed by Waverley Council. (Local ocean swimmers often affectionately refer to any shark they see in the area as Norman.)
Heuer points out that the net – which extends just 150 metres along Bondi’s 800 metres, reaching neither the surface nor the seafloor – was first designed to kill sharks rather than just keep them away from swimmers.
“Back in the ’30s, they thought that if they could kill enough in the nets each year they would eventually bring the numbers down,” Heuer says.
Free divers from the Grey Nurse Shark Census program prepare to get in the water to monitor the grey nurse population at South Bondi.Credit:Edwina Pickles
The targets were bull sharks, white pointers and tiger sharks – although about 90 per cent of kills are other species, or not sharks at all. Indeed, bodies trapped in the nets attract sharks, Heuer says.
Gordon Scott, a diver and retired sea captain who organised the count, said he hopes the data will lead to aggregation sites – where sharks linger as they patrol coastal waters – being protected, as research suggests that repeated injury from fishing hooks is reducing the sharks’ fertility.
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By 5pm on Saturday, 21 sites up and down the coast had reported finding 162 grey nurse sharks, of which more than 100 were counted at Wolf Rock, just south of Fraser Island in Queensland. Two more sites were yet to report.
“It is pretty scary,” Scott said of the number, though he made it clear that because so little study had been done on the sharks, it was still not clear what the count signalled of the animal’s true numbers, which range between 1500 and 2000 on official estimates.
“We just don’t really know how many are left, just that there should be more,” he said.
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